Vessel and Airway Characteristics in One-Year Computed Tomography-defined Rapid Emphysema Progression: SPIROMICS.

Rates of emphysema progression vary in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and the relationships with vascular and airway pathophysiology remain unclear. We sought to determine if indices of peripheral (segmental and beyond) pulmonary arterial dilation measured on computed tomography (CT) are associated with a 1-year index of emphysema (EI; percentage of voxels <-950 Hounsfield units) progression. Five hundred ninety-nine former and never-smokers (Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease stages 0-3) were evaluated from the SPIROMICS (Subpopulations and Intermediate Outcome Measures in COPD Study) cohort: rapid emphysema progressors (RPs;  = 188, 1-year ΔEI > 1%), nonprogressors ( = 301, 1-year ΔEI ± 0.

A semi-automatic framework of measuring pulmonary arterial metrics at anatomic airway locations using CT imaging.

Pulmonary vascular dysfunction has been implicated in smoking-related susceptibility to emphysema. With the growing interest in characterizing arterial morphology for early evaluation of the vascular role in pulmonary diseases, there is an increasing need for the standardization of a framework for arterial morphological assessment at airway segmental levels. In this paper, we present an effective and robust semi-automatic framework to segment pulmonary arteries at different anatomic airway branches and measure their cross-sectional area (CSA).