Pulmonary acinus is the largest airway unit provided with alveoli where blood/gas exchange takes place. Understanding the complete structure of acinus is necessary to measure the pathway of gas exchange and to simulate various mechanical phenomena in the lungs. The usual manual segmentation of a complete acinus structure from their experimentally obtained images is difficult and extremely time-consuming, which hampers the statistical analysis. In this study, we develop a semiautomatic segmentation algorithm for extracting the complete structure of acinus from synchrotron micro-CT images of the closed chest of mouse lungs. The algorithm uses a combination of conventional binary image processing techniques based on the multiscale and hierarchical nature of lung structures. Specifically, larger structures are removed, while smaller structures are isolated from the image by repeatedly applying erosion and dilation operators in order, adjusting the parameter referencing to previously obtained morphometric data. A cluster of isolated acini belonging to the same terminal bronchiole is obtained without floating voxels. The extracted acinar models above 98% agree well with those extracted manually. The run time is drastically shortened compared with manual methods. These findings suggest that our method may be useful for taking samples used in the statistical analysis of acinus.

Understanding the three-dimensional morphology of pulmonary acini is essential when exploring the biomechanics of respiratory function. In this study, we characterized the morphology of individual acini and a cluster of acini stemming from the same terminal conducting airway using a quantitative approach based on the semi-automatic segmentation of synchrotron micro-CT images of mouse lung. The volume and surface area of five clusters of mouse acini including 50 individual acini were estimated based on the voxel and surface mesh of segmented acini at FRC. The pathway length and width were estimated for one cluster including 15 acini based on the skeleton of segmented acini. The acinar volume was 0.09 ± 0.07 mm(3) (mean ± SD), and the surface area was 6.82 ± 4.49 mm(2) , in agreement with previous studies. The volume of the acinar clusters was 0.89 ± 0.34 mm(3) , and the surface area was 68.18 ± 17.66 mm(2) . The largest volume acinus per cluster was found in the distal region of the terminal conducting airway, and apparent respiratory bronchioles were observed only in large-volume acini. The generation number of pathways per acinus was 8 ± 2 (range: 6-12). The pathway length at lower generations (generations 2-6) increased with the generation number in a single cluster, while did not significantly change at lower generations in some acinar groups. The pathway width increased with increasing generation numbers. Our approach characterized the quantitative morphology of pulmonary acinar clusters in mouse lung, and the results can be used in further biomechanical simulation studies. Anat Rec, 299:1424-1434, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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