Development of a 3-D standardized lung template from low-dose CT scans

Giulia Raffaella De Luca, Mario Mascalchi, Stefano Diciotti

Confirmation: I have read and agree with the IEEE BHI 2025 conference submission's policy on behalf of myself and my co-authors.

Keywords: computed tomography, lung imaging, quantitative imaging, template

TL;DR: Lungs lack a standard reference map like the brain has; we built one from screening low-dose CTs and used it to pinpoint how emphysema structurally changes the lungs.

Abstract: Lung imaging lacks a standardized reference space, hindering the large-scale, voxel-wise analyses that are routine in neuroimaging. To address this gap, we developed a high resolution, open-source 3-D lung template and probabilistic lobar atlas from a cohort of 30 subjects from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST). Created using a fully automatic pipeline based on the Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) ecosystem, this template reached convergence (dice similarity coefficient of 0.992 between consecutive iterations) after 11 iterations. We demonstrated its utility by registering 60 subjects with varying emphysema severity, finding that voxel-wise Jacobian analysis could distinguish disease-specific deformation patterns. This work provides a foundational, open resource for standardizing anatomical localization, enabling robust group-level studies in lung cancer screening research.

Track: 3. Imaging Informatics

Registration Id: C9N5457BBD7

Submission Number: 243