Recognition of 3-dimensional medical images of the lungs, pulmonary vessels and bronchial trees by artificial neural networks

Abstract

In this study, three dimensional medical images of the lungs, pulmonary vessels and bronchial trees are recognized and extracted by artificial neural networks. Two neural networks trained using the back propagation algorithm are applied to medical image recognition. First, the neural network recognizes the outline of the lungs and outputs the lung regions and 3-dimensional images of the lungs are displayed. Then, second neural network recognizes outline of the pulmonary vessels and bronchial trees and outputs the regions of them and 3-dimensional images are displayed. These pulmonary vessels and bronchial trees are divided into five lobes by 3-dimensional region growing method. These image processing proposed in this study can be easily applied to another medical image such as MRI image.