Computed Tomography (CT) technologies have been considered for a long time one of the most effective medical imaging tools for morphological analysis of body parts. Contrast-Enhanced CT (CE-CT) also allows emphasising details of tissue structures whose heterogeneity, inspected through visual analysis, conveys crucial information regarding diagnosis and prognosis in several clinical pathologies. Recently, Dynamic CE-CT (DCE-CT) has emerged as a promising technique to perform also functional hemodynamic studies, with wide applications in the oncologic field. DCE-CT is based on repeated scans over time performed after intravenous administration of contrast agent, in order to study the temporal evolution of the tracer in 3D tumour tissue. DCE-CT pushes towards an intensive use of computers to provide automatically quantitative information to be used directly in clinical practice. This requires that visual analysis, representing the gold-standard for CT image interpretation, gains objectivity. This work presents the first automatic approach to quantify and classify the lung tumour heterogeneities based on DCE-CT image sequences, so as it is performed through visual analysis by experts. The approach developed relies on the spatio-temporal indexes we devised, which also allow exploiting temporal data that enrich the knowledge of the tissue heterogeneity by providing information regarding the lesion status.

Automatic classification of lung tumour heterogeneity according to a visual-based score system

BEVILACQUA, ALESSANDRO;BAIOCCO, SERENA
2016

Abstract

Computed Tomography (CT) technologies have been considered for a long time one of the most effective medical imaging tools for morphological analysis of body parts. Contrast-Enhanced CT (CE-CT) also allows emphasising details of tissue structures whose heterogeneity, inspected through visual analysis, conveys crucial information regarding diagnosis and prognosis in several clinical pathologies. Recently, Dynamic CE-CT (DCE-CT) has emerged as a promising technique to perform also functional hemodynamic studies, with wide applications in the oncologic field. DCE-CT is based on repeated scans over time performed after intravenous administration of contrast agent, in order to study the temporal evolution of the tracer in 3D tumour tissue. DCE-CT pushes towards an intensive use of computers to provide automatically quantitative information to be used directly in clinical practice. This requires that visual analysis, representing the gold-standard for CT image interpretation, gains objectivity. This work presents the first automatic approach to quantify and classify the lung tumour heterogeneities based on DCE-CT image sequences, so as it is performed through visual analysis by experts. The approach developed relies on the spatio-temporal indexes we devised, which also allow exploiting temporal data that enrich the knowledge of the tissue heterogeneity by providing information regarding the lesion status.
2016
Alessandro, Bevilacqua; Serena, Baiocco
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/532882
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