Algorithm Design for Automatic Modeling of the First and the Second Level of Airway Tree

Abstract

The models of airway tree designed in this paper are different from the general visual models. The model preserves all the information of the space data when it is created. The space data is mainly consisted by the coordinates of the boundary pixels and the spatial functions of the model surfaces. The algorithm consists of three main steps. Firstly, the boundaries of the airway tree are extracted by Sobel operator. Then, the boundary pixels are ring-likely sorted according to the distance between each other. Finally, each three pixels belong to the adjacent layers form a surface. An airway tree model can be eventually created by iterating the main steps. What’s more, the algorithm has also been optimized, we can mostly get a model in 50 s.