Regional Lung Mechanics by 3D Image Registration

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的目标是使用局部肺机械特性的高分辨率图来检测和跟踪肺部疾病的进展。肺部疾病过程，包括肺气肿、间质纤维化、癌症、肺栓塞、急性肺损伤等，改变肺组织的材料特性并改变呼吸系统的力学。此外，虽然这些机械变化（以及疾病过程本身）起源于局部水平，但它们在很大程度上是无症状的，并且对于目前可用的肺功能的整体测量（例如肺功能测试）是不可见的，直到它们显著进展为止。我们将使用图像配准来构建肺组织特定体积变化（与特定顺应性相关）的区域分布的高分辨率3D图，以及呼吸肺的多个呼吸门控体积图像之间的肺组织应变张量。本项目中开发的计算工具将提供评估呼吸周期中肺实质任意感兴趣区域的局部体积、灰度和形状变化的能力。我们期望，通过跟踪局部肺比容变化的3D分布以及肺应变的大小和方向，我们可以检查局部病理过程对患病组织以及周围正常组织的影响。这些信息可以提供关于肺病理生理学的新见解，例如，肺气肿中肺破坏的扩散、肺栓塞发作中的通气和灌注失配、哮喘中局部气道闭合的影响、急性肺损伤的局部机制和呼吸机相关肺损伤的传播。这一信息现在对于新的肺部疾病疗法的开发和评估至关重要。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals of this research are to use high-resolution maps of regional lung mechanical properties to detect and follow the progression of lung disease. Pulmonary disease processes, including emphysema, interstitial fibrosis, cancer, pulmonary embolism, acute lung injury and more, alter the material properties of lung tissue and change the mechanics of the respiratory system. Furthermore, while these mechanical changes (and the disease process itself) originate at a local level, they are largely asymptomatic and invisible to currently available global measures of lung function such as pulmonary function tests until they have significantly advanced. We will use image registration to construct a high-resolution 3D map of the regional distribution of lung tissue specific volume change (related to specific compliance) and the lung tissue strain tensor between multiple respiratory-gated volumetric images of the breathing lung. The computational tools to be developed in this project will provide the ability to assess local volume, grayscale, and shape changes for arbitrary regions of interest in the lung parenchyma across the respiratory cycle. We expect that, by tracking the 3D distribution of regional lung specific volume change and the magnitude and direction of lung strain, we can examine the effects that localized pathological processes have on diseased tissue as well as surrounding normal tissue. Such information may provide new insights regarding pulmonary pathophysiology in, for instance, the proliferation of lung destruction in emphysema, the ventilation and perfusion mismatches in pulmonary emboli episodes, the effect of regional airway closure in asthma, and the regional mechanics of acute lung injury and the propagation of ventilator-associated lung injury. This information is now critical to the development and evaluation of new pulmonary disease therapies.