Development of a Three-Dimensional Visualization & Atlasing Tool for Pulmonary Gas Distribution from Hyperpolarized 3He Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Andrew Wheatley¹, Usaf Aladl¹, Igor Gyacskov¹, Aaron Fenster^1,2, Grace Parraga^1,2

Until the emergence of hyperpolarized 3He MRI, it has been difficult to quantify and visualize the structure/function relationships of the lung with high spatial and temporal resolution. Our objective was to generate, from static ventilation 3He MRI images of COPD, three-dimensional volumetric lung models that incorporate k-means clustering of differential pixel intensities across the lung that represent partial, fully and non-ventilated regions. We developed software and a visualization environment to generate a set of fully rotational 3D surfaces of the regional ventilation patterns for individual COPD subjects and an image-based lung atlas that combines the functional features of 55 COPD subjects.