An Approach for Pulmonary Vascular Extraction from Chest CT Images.

Pulmonary vascular extraction from chest CT images plays an important role in the diagnosis of lung disease. To improve the accuracy rate of pulmonary vascular segmentation, a new pulmonary vascular extraction approach is proposed in this study. First, the lung tissue is extracted from chest CT images by region-growing and maximum between-class variance methods. Then the holes of the extracted region are filled by morphological operations to obtain complete lung region. Second, the points of the pulmonary vascular of the middle slice of the chest CT images are extracted as the original seed points. Finally, the seed points are spread throughout the lung region based on the fast marching method to extract the pulmonary vascular in the gradient image. Results of pulmonary vascular extraction from chest CT image datasets provided by the introduced approach are presented and discussed. Based on the ground truth pixels and the resulting quality measures, it can be concluded that the average accuracy of this approach is about 90%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method has achieved the best performance in pulmonary vascular extraction compared with other two widely used methods.

Simultaneous extraction of hydrophobic and hydrophilic bioactive compounds from ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe).

Ginger is a commonly used spice around the world. Its bioactive compounds contain hydrophobic gingerols and hydrophilic polysaccharides. Huge physiochemical differences between these compounds and the thermal instability of gingerols impede fast and effective extraction of them using conventional methods. In this research, ionic liquid-based ultrasonic-assisted extraction (ILUAE) was applied to simultaneously extract gingerols and polysaccharides from ginger. Parameters influencing the recovery of gingerols were ionic liquid type, ionic liquid concentration, solid/liquid ratio, ultrasonic power, extraction temperature and extraction time. Compared with traditional methods, LUAE significantly increased the yield of total gingerols and shortened the extraction time. Meanwhile, ginger polysaccharides recovery reached up to 92.82% with ILUAE. Our results indicated that ILUAE has a remarkable capacity to extract gingerols and ginger polysaccharides in one step. Therefore, ILUAE represents a promising technology for simultaneous extraction of hydrophilic and hydrophobic bioactive compounds from plant materials.