VLRLUNG

vlrlung - partition a whole lung mask into two individual masks

vlrlung ia=<airway> il=<lung> ol=<output-left> or=<output-right> [-w] [-v]

vlrlung takes lung candidates (output from vslung), eliminates non-lung objects and perform lung separation using the following steps.

(1) Remove bowel region by eroding airway+lung region and selecting the largest component. Erosion kernel is 7x7x1 sphere by default. (2) To eliminate lung candidates attached to trachea, remove airway from outcome of (1) and perform dilation using the same default kernel. (3) Fill in lung vessels by closing. Default kernel is 20x20x5 sphere. (4) Further eliminate lung candidates around airway by removing all lung pixels in the circle around airway. The circle is the intersection of dilated airway and dilated no-label region. The dilation kernel is 9x9x1 sphere by default. (5) Remove airway filled in by closing in (3). (6) Separate the lungs (vlpart) and dilate the cutting lines by 1x1x3 sphere kernel. (7) Cut the lungs and select the two largest components. If there is only one component (-w flag), an error message is written to stderr and the whole lung is written into right lung (or=). (8) If there are two largest components, left/right lung is determined by the location of their centers (vlngwind). (9) Obtain the lung region overlapping with the cutting lines and add it back to right lung (or=). Output right (or=) and left lung (ol=).

Input ia= and il= are VXB images. Output ol= and or= are VXB images.

vslung(1) vlpart(1)

J. Padgett, Y. Xie