Quantitative airway analysis in longitudinal studies using groupwise registration and 4D optimal surfaces.

Quantifying local changes to the airway wall surfaces from computed tomography images is important in the study of diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Current approaches segment the airways in the individual time point images and subsequently aggregate per airway generation or perform branch matching to assess regional changes. In contrast, we propose an integrated approach analysing the time points simultaneously using a subject-specific groupwise space and 4D optimal surface segmentation. The method combines information from all time points and measurements are matched locally at any position on the resulting surfaces. Visual inspection of the scans of 10 subjects showed increased tree length compared to the state of the art with little change in the amount of false positives. A large scale analysis of the airways of 374 subjects including a total of 1870 images showed significant correlation with lung function and high reproducibility of the measurements.