Quantitative Analysis of Nasal Polyp and Maxillary Bone Using CT Images

Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) is a common health care problem. Nasal polyps are the main factor to make the sinuses blocked causing the CRS and they grow up in the sinuses and even result in the expansion of anterior maxilla. Therefore, an automatic segmentation followed by quantitative measurement is proposed to obtain the volume of maxillary bone. First, the maxillary sinuses were detected and the maxillary bones were identified. The next step was calculating the volume of maxillary bones from a series of computed tomography images. As a result, the volume ratio of maxillary bones and the proportion of the nasal polyps in maxillary sinus was a moderate correlation=0.554 for the superior bones and a fair correlation=0.316 for the lateral bones. Considering the accuracy and efficiency, the proposed automatic procedure was compared to a manual procedure and obtained no significant differences (p-value>0.05). For the clinical use, the proportion of the nasal polyps in the maxillary sinus can predict the growing trend of the bone volume based on the proposed automatic procedure with much shorter time about one minute than the manual procedure.