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.

Erythropoietin augments the efficacy of therapeutic angiogenesis induced by allogenic bone marrow stromal cells in a rat model of limb ischemia.

Transplantation of adult marrow stromal cells (MSCs) has been developed as a new method of treating severe ischemia diseases by therapeutic angiogenesis. Erythropoietin (EPO) is capable of inducing angiogenesis and inhibiting MSCs apoptosis. The effect of EPO on the therapeutic potency of MSCs transplantation in a rat model of limb ischemia was investigated in the current study. The results indicate that the combined treatment with MSC transplantation and EPO infusion is superior to MSC transplantation alone in the treatment of limb ischemia. MSCs transplantation and EPO infusion could enhance the angiogenic effect of each other to achieve a better therapeutic effect. This combination therapy may become a more effective approach for ischemia diseases of the limbs.