Emphysema Region Pre-Detection Method for Emphysema Disease Diagnosis using Lung CT Images

흉부 CT 영상에서 폐기종질환진단을 위한 폐기종영역 사전 탐지 기법

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective algorithm to increase the speed of Emphysema region classification. Emphysema region classification method based on CT image consumes a lot of time because of the large number of subregions due to the large size of CT image. Some of the sub-regions contain no Emphysema and the classification of these regions is worthless. To speed up the classification process, we create an algorithm to select Emphysema region candidates and only use these candidates in the Emphysema region classification instead of all of the sub-regions. First, the lung region is detected. Then we threshold the lung region and only select the dark pixels because Emphysema only appeared in the dark area of the CT image. Then the thresholded pixels are clustered into a region that called the Emphysema pre-detected region or Emphysema region candidate. This region is then divided into sub-region for the Emphysema region classification. The experimental result shows that Emphysema region classification using predetected Emphysema region decreases the size of lung region which will result in about 84.51% of time reduction in Emphysema region classification.