This paper describes a method for quantifying the degree of pulmonary emphysema, one of lung's diseases, by using conventional chest X-ray images. With this method, extraction of blood vessel shadows in lung is carried out first by using a deformable model and the scheme of scale space. In order to characterize the pulmonary emphysema in the chest X-ray images, we determine three features seemed to be strongly correlated to the advance of pulmonary emphysema, which are derived from extracted blood vessel shadows. From comparison between the performance of this method and that of a medical doctor, our results show that this method can be a useful aid in quantitative evaluation of the degree of advance of pulmonary emphysema.

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