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Endotracheal tubes positioning detection in adult portable chest radiography for intensive care unit

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

To present an automated method for detecting endotracheal (ET) tubes and marking their tips in portable chest radiography (CXR) for intensive care units (ICUs).

Methods

In this method, the lung region is first estimated and then the spine is detected between the right lung and the left lung. Because medical tubes are inserted into the body through the throat, the region of interest (ROI) is obtained across the spine. A seed point is determined in the cervical region of the ROI, and then the line path is selected from the seed point. In order to detect ET tubes, the ICU CXR image is preprocessed by contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization. Then, a feature-based threshold method is applied to the line path to determine the tip location. A comparison to the method by use of Hough transform is also presented. The distance (error) between the detected locations and the locations annotated by a radiologist is used to evaluate the detection precision for the tip location.

Results

The proposed method is evaluated using 44 images with ET tubes and 43 images without ET tubes. The discriminant performance for detecting the existence of ET tubes in this study was 95 %, and the average of detection error for the tip location was approximately 2.5 mm.

Conclusions

The proposed method could be useful for detecting malpositioned ET tubes in ICU CXRs.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 81101116, the Foundation of Hujiang (C14002), and the National Sciences Foundation of Shanghai (13ZR1410400).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Optical Electrical and Computer Engineering & Engineering Research, Center of Optical Instrument and System, Ministry of Education, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

    Sheng Chen, Min Zhang & Wentao Xu

  2. Xinhua Hospital, School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China

    Liping Yao

Authors
  1. Sheng Chen
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  2. Min Zhang
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  3. Liping Yao
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  4. Wentao Xu
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sheng Chen or Liping Yao.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standard

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Chen, S., Zhang, M., Yao, L. et al. Endotracheal tubes positioning detection in adult portable chest radiography for intensive care unit. Int J CARS 11, 2049–2057 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-016-1430-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-016-1430-3

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