Charles Hatt

PhD

Imbio LLC

Development Scientist

NLST (Learn more about this study)

NLST-125

Mar 11, 2015

Screening for COPD with Lung CT Densitometry

Over 20 million people are diagnosed with COPD in the United States with significantly more undiagnosed. With the growing number high-risk patients undergoing CT-based lung screening due to the published results of the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) there is an opportunity to screen the same patients for COPD using the images already being acquired. This project aims to implement a fully automated software tool to quantify the extent of emphysema in lung screening CT scans. By using a fully automated quantification tool, COPD screening could take place with minimal burden to the Radiologist and give reliable and repeatable metrics.

This project is a partnership between the University of Michigan and Imbio LLC. Imbio’s commercial lung analysis software, which just received FDA clearance, also includes a tool to quantify emphysema in inspiration CT scans. It is this component of the software that we will use to analyze the NLST data to determine the potential for COPD screening using emphysema quantification. In addition to having an FDA cleared emphysema quantification tool, Imbio has a proprietary cloud-computing platform capable of high throughput image analysis.

Once the emphysema quantification completed, the amount of emphysema will be correlated with pulmonary function tests to determine if the Imbio software can be used to predict the GOLD status of the patient and modify the risk prediction for future cancer development. Other information such as smoking history and demographic information will be included in the statistical model in order to give a more reliable prediction. Emphysema quantification will also be combined with a novel CT-based nodule characterization tool under development at Imbio to investigate the ability of a combined densitometry and nodule characterization technique to predict lung cancer outcomes. If successful, this tool could be used by a primary care physician to determine if a high-risk patient should be referred to a pulmonologist for further tests.

By screening undiagnosed COPD patients, we hope to improve overall health outcomes and lower costs by reducing the number of undiagnosed COPD patients at risk for exacerbation events without being supervised by a physician.