ERJ Express. Published on August 9, 2012 as doi: 10.1183/09031936.00050112

Regional lung function and heterogeneity of specific gas volume in health and emphysema    

Aliverti A.1, Pennati F. 1, Salito C.1, Woods J.C. 2,3 1

TBMLab, Dipartimento di Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Departments of 2Radiology and 3Physics, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA;

This work was supported in part by NIH grant R01- HL090806 and Fondazione U.Veronesi. Andrea Aliverti (ph: +39-0223999006; fax: +39-0223999000; e-mail: [email protected]) TBMLab, Dipartimento di Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Via G. Colombo, 40, 20133 Milano, Italy                        

ABSTRACT To study regional lung function by standard CT and characterize regional variations of density and specific gas volume (SVg) between different lung volumes, we studied 10 healthy and 10 severe emphysematous subjects. Correspondent CT images taken at high and low lung volumes were registered by optical flow to obtain 2-D maps of pixel-by-pixel differences of density (HU) and SVg (SVg) at slice levels near the aortic arch, carina and top diaphragm.

Copyright 2012 by the European Respiratory Society.

In healthy subjects, HU was higher at all levels (p