Automatic tracking of vessel-like structures from a single starting point
University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro（里约热内卢天主教大学）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；Rio de Janeiro State University（里约热内卢州立大学）
Dario Augusto Borges Oliveira, Laura Leal-Taixe, Raul Queiroz Feitosa, Bodo Rosenhahn
The identification of vascular networks is an important topic in the medical image analysis community. While most methods focus on single vessel tracking, the few solutions that exist for tracking complete vascular networks are usually computationally intensive and require a lot of user interaction. In this paper we present a method to track full vascular networks iteratively using a single starting point. Our approach is based on a cloud of sampling points distributed over concentric spherical layers. We also proposed a vessel model and a metric of how well a sample point fits this model. Then, we implement the network tracking as a min-cost flow problem, and propose a novel optimization scheme to iteratively track the vessel structure by inherently handling bifurcations and paths. The method was tested using both synthetic and real images. On the 9 different data-sets of synthetic blood vessels, we achieved maximum accuracies of more than 98\%. We further use the synthetic data-set to analyse the sensibility of our method to parameter setting, showing the robustness of the proposed algorithm. For real images, we used coronary, carotid and pulmonary data to segment vascular structures and present the visual results. Still for real images, we present numerical and visual results for networks of nerve fibers in the olfactory system. Further visual results also show the potential of our approach for identifying vascular networks topologies. The presented method delivers good results for the several different datasets tested and have potential for segmenting vessel-like structures. Also, the topology information, inherently extracted, can be used for further analysis to computed aided diagnosis and surgical planning. Finally, the method's modular aspect holds potential for problem-oriented adjustments and improvements.
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Retinal images provide early signs of diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and hypertension. These signs can be investigated based on microaneurysms or smaller vessels. The diagnostic biomarkers are the change of vessel widths and angles especially at junctions, which are investigated using the vessel segmentation or tracking. Vessel paths may also be interrupted; crossings and bifurcations may be disconnected. This paper addresses a novel contextual method based on the geometry of the primary visual cortex (V1) to study these difficulties. We have analyzed the specific problems at junctions with a…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales（社会科学高等学院）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Tree-like structures such as retinal images are widely studied in computer-aided diagnosis systems for large-scale screening programs. Despite several segmentation and tracking methods proposed in the literature, there still exist several limitations specifically when two or more curvilinear structures cross or bifurcate, or in the presence of interrupted lines or highly curved blood vessels. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on multi-orientation scores augmented with a contextual affinity matrix, which both are inspired by the geometry of the primary visual cortex (V1) and thei…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine（维克森林再生医学研究所）
Ultra High Frequency Ultrasound (UHFUS) enables the visualization of highly deformable small and medium vessels in the hand. Intricate vessel-based measurements, such as intimal wall thickness and vessel wall compliance, require sub-millimeter vessel tracking between B-scans. Our fast GPU-based approach combines the advantages of local phase analysis, a distance-regularized level set, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), to rapidly segment and track the deforming vessel contour. We validated on 35 UHFUS sequences of vessels in the hand, and we show the transferability of the approach to 5 more…
Vesselpose: Vessel Graph Reconstruction from Learned Voxel-wise Direction Vectors in 3D Vascular Images
Max-Delbrueck-Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association（马克斯·德尔布鲁克医学研究中心（马克斯·德尔布鲁克医学研究中心））；Humboldt University of Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Helmholtz Imaging（海德堡成像）；German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK)（德国心脏病研究中心（DZHK））；Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC)（实验与临床研究中心（ECRC））
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；University Eye Clinic Maastricht（马斯特里赫特大学眼科诊所）
This paper presents a method for retinal vasculature extraction based on biologically inspired multi-orientation analysis. We apply multi-orientation analysis via so-called invertible orientation scores, modeling the cortical columns in the visual system of higher mammals. This allows us to generically deal with many hitherto complex problems inherent to vessel tracking, such as crossings, bifurcations, parallel vessels, vessels of varying widths and vessels with high curvature. Our approach applies tracking in invertible orientation scores via a novel geometrical principle for curve optimizat…
Vasculature is known to be of key biological significance, especially in the study of cancer. As such, considerable effort has been focused on the automated measurement and analysis of vasculature in medical and pre-clinical images. In tumors in particular, the vascular networks may be extremely irregular and the appearance of the individual vessels may not conform to classical descriptions of vascular appearance. Typically, vessels are extracted by either a segmentation and thinning pipeline, or by direct tracking. Neither of these methods are well suited to microscopy images of tumor vascula…
This article deals with the problem of vessel edge and centerline detection using classical image processing techniques due to their simpleness and easiness to be implemented. The method is divided into four steps: the vessel enhancement which implies a non-linear filtering proposed by Frangi, the thresholding using Otsu method and the contour detection using the Canny edge detector due to its good performances for the small vessels and the morphological skeletonisation. The algorithms are tested on real data collected from a cardiac catheterism laboratory and it is accurate for images with go…
Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学机器人研究所）；School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学自动化与智能感知学院）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）
We present a fully automated method for top-down segmentation of the pulmonary arterial tree in low-dose thoracic CT images. The main basal pulmonary arteries are identified near the lung hilum by searching for candidate vessels adjacent to known airways, identified by our previously reported airway segmentation method. Model cylinders are iteratively fit to the vessels to track them into the lungs. Vessel bifurcations are detected by measuring the rate of change of vessel radii, and child vessels are segmented by initiating new trackers at bifurcation points. Validation is accomplished using …
Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network-Inspired Vessel Identification and Tracking for UAV-Based Maritime Surveillance
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学）；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Developing efficient vessel-tracking algorithms is crucial for imaging-based diagnosis and treatment of vascular diseases. Vessel tracking aims to solve recognition problems such as key (seed) point detection, centerline extraction, and vascular segmentation. Extensive image-processing techniques have been developed to overcome the problems of vessel tracking that are mainly attributed to the complex morphologies of vessels and image characteristics of angiography. This paper presents a literature review on vessel-tracking methods, focusing on machine-learning-based methods. First, the convent…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet, University Hospital of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学医院）；Erasmus MC（伊拉斯谟医学中心）
Segmenting tree structures is common in several image processing applications. In medical image analysis, reliable segmentations of airways, vessels, neurons and other tree structures can enable important clinical applications. We present a framework for tracking tree structures comprising of elongated branches using probabilistic state-space models and Bayesian smoothing. Unlike most existing methods that proceed with sequential tracking of branches, we present an exploratory method, that is less sensitive to local anomalies in the data due to acquisition noise and/or interfering structures. …
Variously stained histology slices are routinely used by pathologists to assess extracted tissue samples from various anatomical sites and determine the presence or extent of a disease. Evaluation of sequential slides is expected to enable a better understanding of the spatial arrangement and growth patterns of cells and vessels. In this paper we present a practical two-step approach based on diffeomorphic registration to align digitized sequential histopathology stained slides to each other, starting with an initial affine step followed by the estimation of a detailed deformation field.
In this paper, a new technique for camera calibration using only GPS data is presented. A new way of tracking objects that move on a plane in a video is achieved by using the location and size of the bounding box to estimate the distance, achieving an average prediction error of 5.55m per 100m distance from the camera. This solution can be run in real-time at the edge, achieving efficient inference in a low-powered IoT environment while also being able to track multiple different vessels.
TriSAM: Tri-Plane SAM for zero-shot cortical blood vessel segmentation in VEM images
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University（哈佛大学工程与应用科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, Boston College（波士顿学院计算机科学系）；Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University（哈佛大学分子与细胞生物学系）
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa（夏威夷大学马诺阿分校）；Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific（海军信息战中心太平洋分部）
Event cameras are ideal for object tracking applications due to their ability to capture fast-moving objects while mitigating latency and data redundancy. Existing event-based clustering and feature tracking approaches for surveillance and object detection work well in the majority of cases, but fall short in a maritime environment. Our application of maritime vessel detection and tracking requires a process that can identify features and output a confidence score representing the likelihood that the feature was produced by a vessel, which may trigger a subsequent alert or activate a classific…
Imaging technology center, Fujifilm corporation（富士胶片株式会社影像技术中心）；Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, University of Tsukuba（筑波大学人工智能研究中心）；Department of Computer science and engineering, Waseda university（早稻田大学计算机科学与工程系）
Reconstructing Portal Vein and Hepatic Vein trees from contrast enhanced abdominal CT scans is a prerequisite for preoperative liver surgery simulation. Existing deep learning based methods treat vascular tree reconstruction as a semantic segmentation problem. However, vessels such as hepatic and portal vein look very similar locally and need to be traced to their source for robust label assignment. Therefore, semantic segmentation by looking at local 3D patch results in noisy misclassifications. To tackle this, we propose a novel multi-task deep learning architecture for vessel tree reconstru…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Visual recognition of material boundaries in transparent vessels is valuable for numerous applications. Such recognition is essential for estimation of fill-level, volume and phase-boundaries as well as for tracking of such chemical processes as precipitation, crystallization, condensation, evaporation and phase-separation. The problem of material boundary recognition in images is particularly complex for materials with non-flat surfaces, i.e., solids, powders and viscous fluids, in which the material interfaces have unpredictable shapes. This work demonstrates a general method for finding the…
DMSORT: An efficient parallel maritime multi-object tracking architecture for unmanned vessel platforms
College of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China（信息科学与工程学院，中国海洋大学）；Marine Engineering College, Dalian Maritime University（航海工程学院，大连海事大学）；CSSC Haiwei Tech Co., Ltd（CSSC海威科技有限公司）；College of Artificial Intelligence, Dalian Maritime University（人工智能学院，大连海事大学）；College of Marine Electrical Engineering, Dalian Maritime University（海洋电气工程学院，大连海事大学）
McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）；Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading causes of death around the world. One of the most common imaging methods for diagnosing this disease is X-ray angiography. Diagnosing using these images is usually challenging due to non-uniform illumination, low contrast, presence of other body tissues, presence of catheter etc. These challenges make the diagnoses task of cardiologists tougher and more prone to misdiagnosis. In this paper we propose a new automated framework for coronary arteries segmentation, catheter detection and center-line extraction in x-ray angiography images. Our proposed s…
Computer Science Department, Henry Samueli School of Engineering Stein Eye Institute, David Geffen School of Medicine University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
The reliable segmentation of retinal vasculature can provide the means to diagnose and monitor the progression of a variety of diseases affecting the blood vessel network, including diabetes and hypertension. We leverage the power of convolutional neural networks to devise a reliable and fully automated method that can accurately detect, segment, and analyze retinal vessels. In particular, we propose a novel, fully convolutional deep neural network with an encoder-decoder architecture that employs dilated spatial pyramid pooling with multiple dilation rates to recover the lost content in the e…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet（Rigshospitalet医院）；Erasmus MC（伊拉斯谟大学医学中心）
In this work, we adapt a method based on multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) that has been shown to give state-of-the-art vessel segmentation results in interactive settings, for the purpose of extracting trees. Regularly spaced tubular templates are fit to image data forming local hypotheses. These local hypotheses are used to construct the MHT tree, which is then traversed to make segmentation decisions. However, some critical parameters in this method are scale-dependent and have an adverse effect when tracking structures of varying dimensions. We propose to use statistical ranking of local …
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet, University Hospital of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学医院）；Erasmus MC Rotterdam（鹿特丹伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心）
Knowledge of airway tree morphology has important clinical applications in diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. We present an automatic tree extraction method based on multiple hypothesis tracking and template matching for this purpose and evaluate its performance on chest CT images. The method is adapted from a semi-automatic method devised for vessel segmentation. Idealized tubular templates are constructed that match airway probability obtained from a trained classifier and ranked based on their relative significance. Several such regularly spaced templates form the local hyp…
Medical research suggests that the anterior-posterior (AP)-diameter of the inferior vena cava (IVC) and its associated temporal variation as imaged by bedside ultrasound is useful in guiding fluid resuscitation of the critically-ill patient. Unfortunately, indistinct edges and gaps in vessel walls are frequently present which impede accurate estimation of the IVC AP-diameter for both human operators and segmentation algorithms. The majority of research involving use of the IVC to guide fluid resuscitation involves manual measurement of the maximum and minimum AP-diameter as it varies over time…
This work presents a framework for tracking head movements and capturing the movements of the mouth and both the eyebrows in real-time. We present a head tracker which is a combination of a optical flow and a template based tracker. The estimation of the optical flow head tracker is used as starting point for the template tracker which fine-tunes the head estimation. This approach together with re-updating the optical flow points prevents the head tracker from drifting. This combination together with our switching scheme, makes our tracker very robust against fast movement and motion-blur. We …
The motivation of our work is to present a new visualization-guided computing paradigm to combine direct 3D volume processing and volume rendered clues for effective 3D exploration such as extracting and visualizing microstructures in-vivo. However, it is still challenging to extract and visualize high fidelity 3D vessel structure due to its high sparseness, noisiness, and complex topology variations. In this paper, we present an end-to-end deep learning method, VC-Net, for robust extraction of 3D microvasculature through embedding the image composition, generated by maximum intensity projecti…
Vascular tracking of angiographic image sequences is one of the most clinically important tasks in the diagnostic assessment and interventional guidance of cardiac disease. However, this task can be challenging to accomplish because of unsatisfactory angiography image quality and complex vascular structures. Thus, this study proposed a new greedy graph search-based method for vascular tracking. Each vascular branch is separated from the vasculature and is tracked independently. Then, all branches are combined using topology optimization, thereby resulting in complete vasculature tracking. A gr…
The encoding of the target in object tracking moves from the coarse bounding-box to fine-grained segmentation map recently. Revisiting de facto real-time approaches that are capable of predicting mask during tracking, we observed that they usually fork a light branch from the backbone network for segmentation. Although efficient, directly fusing backbone features without considering the negative influence of background clutter tends to introduce false-negative predictions, lagging the segmentation accuracy. To mitigate this problem, we propose an attention retrieval network (ARN) to perform so…
Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam（鹿特丹伊拉斯姆斯医学中心（鹿特丹大学医学中心）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is typically performed with image guidance using X-ray angiograms in which coronary arteries are opacified with X-ray opaque contrast agents. Interventional cardiologists typically navigate instruments using non-contrast-enhanced fluoroscopic images, since higher use of contrast agents increases the risk of kidney failure. When using fluoroscopic images, the interventional cardiologist needs to rely on a mental anatomical reconstruction. This paper reports on the development of a novel dynamic coronary roadmapping approach for improving visual feedback …
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所）；University of Technology Vienna（维也纳技术大学）
This survey presents a deep analysis of the learning and inference capabilities in nine popular trackers. It is neither intended to study the whole literature nor is it an attempt to review all kinds of neural networks proposed for visual tracking. We focus instead on Siamese neural networks which are a promising starting point for studying the challenging problem of tracking. These networks integrate efficiently feature learning and the temporal matching and have so far shown state-of-the-art performance. In particular, the branches of Siamese networks, their layers connecting these branches,…
In this paper, we present a new method for detecting road users in an urban environment which leads to an improvement in multiple object tracking. Our method takes as an input a foreground image and improves the object detection and segmentation. This new image can be used as an input to trackers that use foreground blobs from background subtraction. The first step is to create foreground images for all the frames in an urban video. Then, starting from the original blobs of the foreground image, we merge the blobs that are close to one another and that have similar optical flow. The next step …
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center（国立循环器病研究中心）
Purpose: The motion of the common carotid artery tissue layers along the vessel axis during the cardiac cycle, observed in ultrasound imaging, is associated with the presence of established cardiovascular risk factors. However, the vast majority of the methods are based on the tracking of a single point, thus failing to capture the overall motion of the entire arterial wall. The aim of this work is to introduce a motion tracking framework able to simultaneously extract the trajectory of a large collection of points spanning the entire exploitable width of the image. Method: The longitudinal mo…
