Early-stage Interstitial Lung Disease Identification
Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) is a group of lung parenchymal diseases. The most common types of ILDs include: usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP), nonspecific interstitial pneumonia (NSIP), hypersensitivity pneumonitis and sarcoidosis. In early stages, the spatial distribution of diseased parenchymal tissues is usually a strong indicator of the ILD subtype. For example, UIP cases often have a subpleural, basal and peripheral distribution while NSIP cases have a basal and relative subpleural sparing distribution (see Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Coronal and axial views of a UIP case (left) and an NSIP case (right). Currently a fully-automated algorithm is under development. The algorithm first partitions the parenchymal region into equal-volume subsections in 3D space. Then image features are computed for each subsection to represent the disease tissue spatial distribution. These features are used to characterize the ILD subtype.
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