Emphysema quantification on cardiac CT scans using hidden markov measure field model: The MESA lung study

Abstract

Cardiac computed tomography (CT) scans include approximately 2/3 of the lung and can be obtained with low radiation exposure. Large cohorts of population-based research studies reported high correlations of emphysema quantification between full-lung (FL) and cardiac CT scans,using thresholding-based measurements. This work extends a hidden Markov measure field (HMMF) model-based segmentation method for automated emphysema quantification on cardiac CT scans. We show that the HMMF-based method,when compared with several types of thresholding,provides more reproducible emphysema segmentation on repeated cardiac scans,and more consistent measurements between longitudinal cardiac and FL scans from a diverse pool of scanner types and thousands of subjects with ten thousands of scans.