AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION AND DISPLAY OF THE TRACHEOBRONCHIAL PLANE

摘要

Usually orthogonal slices of a three-dimensional image set of a tracheobronchial tree (40) of a body do not show the tracheobronchial plane. Thus, the plane has to be adjusted manually by the user by trial and error, which is a tedious and time consuming process. The concept of the invention suggests a method of automated extraction and display of at least one oblique slice (49) of the tracheobronchial plane from a three- dimensional image set of a body. The method is fully automated without any user interaction. According to the invention the method comprises the step of: automatically identifying set of image points being part of a tracheobronchial tree (40); automatically identifying at least one oblique slice (49) as a fit to the image points; automatically performing a reformation step on the three-dimensional image set to extract the oblique slice (49); and automatically displaying (Fig. 6, 7) the oblique slice (49) of the tracheobronchial plane. The concept also provides a respective system (1), image acquisition device, workstation and computer program product and information carrier.