The interpretation of high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) images of the chest showing disorders of the lung tissue associated with interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) is time-consuming and requires experience. Whereas automatic detection and quantification of the lung tissue patterns showed promising results in several studies, its aid for the clinicians is limited to the challenge of image interpretation, letting the radiologists with the problem of the final histological diagnosis. Complementary to lung tissue categorization, providing visually similar cases using content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is in line with the clinical workflow of the radiologists.In a preliminary study, a Euclidean distance based on volume percentages of five lung tissue types was used as inter-case distance for CBIR. The latter showed the feasibility of retrieving similar histological diagnoses of ILD based on visual content, although no localization information was used for CBIR. However, to retrieve and show similar images with pathology appearing at a particular lung position was not possible. In this work, a 3D localization system based on lung anatomy is used to localize low-level features used for CBIR. When compared to our previous study, the introduction of localization features allows improving early precision for some histological diagnoses, especially when the region of appearance of lung tissue disorders is important.

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Abstract. Image registration is a fundamental problem in medical imaging. It is especially challenging in lung images compared, for example, with the brain. The challenges include large anatomical variations of human lung and a lack of fixed landmarks inside the lung. This paper presents a new method for lung HRCT image registration. It employs a landmark-based global transformation and a novel ray-tracing-based lung surface registration. The proposed surface registration method has two desirable properties: 1) it is fully reversible, and 2) it ensures that the registered lung will be inside the target lung. We evaluated the registration performance by applying it to lung regions mapping. Tested on 46 scans, the registered regions were 89% accurate compared with the ground-truth.