T. Guerrero, K. Sanders, R. Castillo, B. Rivera, D. Cody, R. Price, L. Bidaut, and R. Komaki (USA)
Pulmonary compliance, rodents, optical flow, computed tomography
Purpose: To develop a technique for generating a high resolution 3D pulmonary compliance image in a rodent model from CT images. Materials & Methods: A series of three 150 gram Fischer 344 rats were anesthesized, intubated, and mechanically ventilated. A GE flat panel CT scanner (0.15 mm resolution) was utilized for image acquisition. The thorax of each animal was imaged with breath-holds at 2, 6, 10, 14, and 18 cm H2O pressure. A deformable image registration algorithm was applied to each pair of CT images to map corresponding tissue elements. Adjacent pairs of CT images (2 & 6, 6 & 10, 10 & 14, 14 & 18 cm H2O) were utilized to calculate the pulmonary compliance on a voxel by voxel basis. The resulting summed whole lung compliance was compared with that obtained from manual segmentation of the lung volume for each pair. Results: The 3D pulmonary compliance images revealed regional heterogeneity of compliance. The calculated total lung compliance compared favorably with the values obtained using manually segmented lung volumes, with a correlation coefficient of R=0.93. The compliance versus pressure relationship was nonlinear. Conclusions: We have demonstrated a unique method of quantifying regional lung compliance with sub-millimeter spatial resolution in a rat model.
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