Three-dimensional reconstruction of the human upper airway from computed tomography images

An accurate reconstruction of the human upper airway is necessary for modeling and analyzing the transport and deposition of inhaled aerosols. The major object of this paper is to rebuild a three-dimensional geometric model including nasal cavity, pharynx, larynx and trachea, which is used to research the effect of inhaled aerosols on the human upper airway. This geometric model is an anatomically realistic model which derives from three-dimensional computed tomography images scanning from the whole respiratory tract of a normal adult male with 0.75 mm intervals. With the CT data provided and using image and graphics recognition technologies, we reconstruct an accurate three-dimensional model of the human upper airway (STL file format) which can be directly used by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of airflow and particle transport and laser rapid prototyping manufacture (LRPM) of respiratory tract model for the further experimental study