Quantitative computed tomographic measurement of a cross-sectional area of a small pulmonary vessel in nonsmokers without airflow limitation

Abstract

There was a significant correlation between pulmonary small vascular alteration and airflow impairment even in nonsmokers without airway obstruction.

Adverse effect of smoking on cross‐sectional area of small pulmonary vessel and arterial stiffness in healthy smokers without COPD

“…We also found a significant association between the CSA of small pulmonary vessels and other clinical variables. For instance, FEV 1 /FVC was the independent determinant predicting the CSA of small pulmonary vessel in non‐smokers and smokers and a previous study obtained similar results in non‐smokers without significant airflow obstruction . Based on pathological specimens, it was reported that pulmonary vascular remodeling occurs because of smooth muscle cell proliferation and elastin and collagen deposition in smokers without airflow obstruction .…”

“…For instance, FEV 1 /FVC was the independent determinant predicting the CSA of small pulmonary vessel in non-smokers and smokers and a previous study obtained similar results in non-smokers without significant airflow obstruction. 25 Based on pathological F I G U R E 2 Correlations between the amount of smoking, small pulmonary vascular alteration and arterial stiffness in smokers. A, The packyears was significantly correlated with %CSA<5 (r = −0.631, P < 0.001) in smokers.…”

Quantitative assessment of cross-sectional area of small pulmonary vessels in patients with COPD using inspiratory and expiratory MDCT

“…However, few studies have focused on pulmonary vessels. Recently, Matsuoka et al proposed the cross-sectional area (CSA) of small pulmonary vessels as a parameter of pulmonary vessel alterations in patients with COPD [10][11][12]. They reported that in case of severe emphysema the total CSA of sub-subsegmental vessels correlated with the mean pulmonary arterial pressure.…”

Automatic reconstruction of the arterial and venous trees on volumetric chest CT

“…In that study, 27 an orientation vector field o is generated to refine the tree structure by solving the global optimization problem delineated in Eq. (6). This equation makes the orientation vectors similar to the edge direction and maintains a similar direction between a vertex v i and its…”

“…Recently, several studies suggested that vascular alteration is closely related to endothelial dysfunction 2 which is claimed to be related to emphysema. 3,4 From this point of view, Matsuoka and co-workers 5,6 recently attempted to show a correlation between the area of small pulmonary vessels and pulmonary function tests (PFT). To find small vessels, they select circular regions whose areas were less than 5 mm 2 after simple thresholding in a 2D computed tomography (CT) slice.…”