Computer-aided Diagnosis of Pulmonary Embolism in Opacified CT Images

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is an extremely common and highly lethal con-dition that is a leading cause of death in all age groups. Over the past 10 years, computed tomography (CT) scanners have gained acceptance as a minimally invasive method for diagnosing PE. In this manuscript, a frame-work for computer-aided diagnosis of PE in contrast-enhanced CT images is presented. It consists of a combination of a method for segmenting the pulmonary arteries (PA), emboli detection methods as well as a scheme for evaluating their performances. The segmentation of the PA serves one of the clot detection methods, and is carried out through a region growing method that makes use of a priori knowledge of vessel topology. Two differ-ent approaches for clot detection are proposed: the first one performs clot detection by analyzing the concavities in the segmentation of the pulmonary arterial tree. It works in a semi-automatic way and it enables the detection of thrombi in the larger sections of the PA. The second method does no