Method of Pulmonary Fissure Segmentation Based on Fuzzy Distance Transform

A pulmonary fissure is a boundary between the lobes in the pulmonary. The segmentation of it plays an important role in the clinical diagnosis. This paper describes a new method for the segmentation of pulmonary fissures. A membership function and a threshold are firstly combined to segment the contour of pulmonary fissures with fuzzy boundaries. Then, fuzzy distance transform (FDT) is operated on the contour image, and the ridges of FDT image accurately indicate the pulmonary fissures. The key points of fissure are determined by combining the local maximum of FDT image and the local minimum gradient of FDT images. Finally, a continuous pulmonary fissure is obtained by tracking the maximal neighborhood points.