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Abstract

Pulmonary embolism (PE) aects up to 600,000 patients and contributes to at least 100,000 deaths every year in the United States alone. Diagnosis of PE can be dicult as most symptoms are unspecic and early diagnosis is essential for successful treatment. Computed Tomography (CT) images can show morphological anomalies that suggest the existance of PE. Various image-based procedures have been proposed for improving computer-aided diagnosis of PE. We propose a novel method for detecting PE based on localized vessel-based features computed in Dual Energy CT (DECT) images. DECT provides 4D data indexed by the three spatial coordinates and the energy level. The proposed features encode the variation of the Hounseld Units across the dierent levels and the CT attenuation related to the amount of iodine contrast in each vessel. A local classication of the vessels is obtained through the classication of these features. Moreover, the localization of the vessel in the lung provides better comparison between patients. Results show that the simple features designed are able to classify pulmonary embolism patients with an AUC (area under the receiver operating curve) of 0.71 on a lobe basis. Prior segmentation of the lung lobes is not necessary because an automatic atlas-based segmentation obtains similar AUC levels (0.65) for the same dataset. The automatic atlas reaches 0.80 AUC in a larger dataset with more control cases.

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