Baral Aneesha, Lee Simone, Hussaini Farah, Matthew Brianna, Lebron Alfredo, Wang Muyang, Hsu Li-Yueh, Moss Joel, Wen Han
Laboratory of Imaging Physics, Biochemistry and Biophysics Center, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Diagnostics (Basel). 2024 Jul 15;14(14):1529. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics14141529.
In cystic lung diseases such as lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a CT-based cyst score that measures the percentage of the lung volume occupied by cysts is a common index of the cyst burden in the lungs. Although the current semi-automatic measurement of the cyst score is well established, it is susceptible to human operator variabilities. We recently developed a fully automatic method incorporating adaptive features in place of manual adjustments. In this clinical study, the automatic method is validated against the standard method in several aspects. These include the agreement between the cyst scores of the two methods, the agreement of each method with independent tests of pulmonary function, and the temporal consistency of the measurements in the consecutive visits of the same patients. We found that the automatic method agreed with the standard method as well as the agreement between two trained operators running the same standard method; both methods obtained the same level of correlation with laboratory pulmonary function tests; the automated method had better temporal consistency than the standard method ( < 0.0001). The study indicates that the automatic method could replace the standard method and provide better consistency in assessing the extent of cystic changes in the lungs of patients.
在诸如淋巴管平滑肌瘤病（LAM）等囊性肺疾病中，基于CT的囊肿评分用于测量肺部囊肿所占肺容积的百分比，是肺部囊肿负荷的常用指标。尽管目前囊肿评分的半自动测量方法已得到充分确立，但它易受操作人员差异的影响。我们最近开发了一种全自动方法，该方法采用自适应特征取代了人工调整。在这项临床研究中，从多个方面对该自动方法与标准方法进行了验证。这些方面包括两种方法的囊肿评分之间的一致性、每种方法与肺功能独立测试的一致性，以及同一患者连续就诊时测量结果的时间一致性。我们发现，自动方法与标准方法一致，且与两名采用相同标准方法的训练有素的操作人员之间的一致性相同；两种方法与实验室肺功能测试的相关性水平相同；自动方法的时间一致性优于标准方法（P<0.0001）。该研究表明，自动方法可以取代标准方法，并在评估患者肺部囊性变化程度方面提供更好的一致性。
