The Computer-Aided Lung Informatics for Pathology Evaluation and Rating (CALIPER) software was developed at the Mayo Clinic to perform quantitative analysis of lung parenchyma for diffuse lung disease, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and interstitial lung disease (ILD).
Previous research has found that CALIPER analytics correlate with physiology, radiologist assessment of disease, and other metrics of disease severity in COPD and ILD, as well as with outcomes/mortality in some specific diseases such as usual interstitial pneumonia/idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, said presenter Katelynn Wilton.
"For this study, our goal was to determine if these CALIPER parenchymal metrics correlate with physiologic variables and response to therapy in a set of subjects with known connective tissue diseases, polymyositis or dermatomyositis, in which pulmonary involvement may or may not be the predominant manifestation of disease," she explained to AuntMinnie.com.
The CALIPER analysis -- including identification and quantification of baseline ILD as well as detection of change -- of parenchymal involvement may prove to be a useful clinical tool in patients with idiopathic inflammatory myopathy, the researchers concluded.
"The objective evaluation of [high-resolution CT] features by CALIPER is not limited by patient effort or muscular weakness, so this objective way to determine parenchymal involvement early in disease and lung-specific response to therapy would be very helpful in clinical practice," Wilton said.
