Quantitative analysis of vessel wall structures by automated vessel wall segmentation provides useful imaging biomarkers in evaluating atherosclerotic lesions and plaque progression time-efficiently. To quantify vessel wall features, drawing lumen and outer wall contours of the artery of interest is required. To alleviate manual labor in contour drawing, some computer-assisted tools exist, but manual preprocessing steps, such as region of interest identification and boundary initialization are needed. In addition, the prior knowledge of the ring shape of vessel wall is not taken into consideration in designing the segmentation method. In this work, trained on manual vessel wall contours, a fully automated artery localization and vessel wall segmentation system is proposed. A tracklet refinement algorithm is used to robustly identify the centerlines of arteries of interest from a neural network localization architecture. Image patches are extracted from the centerlines and segmented in a polar coordinate system to use 3D information and to overcome problems such as contour discontinuity and interference from neighboring vessels. From a carotid artery dataset with 116 subjects (3406 slices) and a popliteal artery dataset with 5 subjects (289 slices), the proposed system is shown to robustly identify the artery of interest and segment the vessel wall. The proposed system demonstrates better performance on the carotid dataset with a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.824, compared with traditional vessel wall segmentation methods, Dice of 0.576, and traditional convolutional neural network approaches, Dice of 0.747. This vessel wall segmentation system will facilitate research on atherosclerosis and assist radiologists in image review.
Henan University of Chinese Medicine(河南中医药大学);Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications(北京邮电大学);Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所)
In recent years, deep convolution neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved great prospects in coronary artery vessel segmentation. However, it is difficult to deploy complicated models in clinical scenarios since high-performance approaches have excessive parameters and high computation costs. To tackle this problem, we propose \textbf{LightVessel}, a Similarity Knowledge Distillation Framework, for lightweight coronary artery vessel segmentation. Primarily, we propose a Feature-wise Similarity Distillation (FSD) module for semantic-shift modeling. Specifically, we calculate the feature similarit…
Youtu Lab, Tencent(腾讯优图实验室);School of Information Science and Engineering, Xiamen University(厦门大学信息科学与工程学院)
Retinal artery/vein (A/V) classification plays a critical role in the clinical biomarker study of how various systemic and cardiovascular diseases affect the retinal vessels. Conventional methods of automated A/V classification are generally complicated and heavily depend on the accurate vessel segmentation. In this paper, we propose a multi-task deep neural network with spatial activation mechanism that is able to segment full retinal vessel, artery and vein simultaneously, without the pre-requirement of vessel segmentation. The input module of the network integrates the domain knowledge of w…
Carotid artery vessel wall thickness measurement is an essential step in the monitoring of patients with atherosclerosis. This requires accurate segmentation of the vessel wall, i.e., the region between an artery's lumen and outer wall, in black-blood magnetic resonance (MR) images. Commonly used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation are suboptimal for this task as their use does not guarantee a contiguous ring-shaped segmentation. Instead, in this work, we cast vessel wall segmentation as a multi-task regression problem in a polar coordinate system. For each carotid a…
Accurate measurements of abnormalities like Artery-Vein ratio and tortuosity in fundus images is an actively researched task. Most of the research seems to compute such features independently. However, in this work, we have devised a fully automated technique to measure any vascular abnormalities. This paper is a follow-up paper on vessel topology estimation and extraction, we use the extracted topology to perform A-V state-of-the-art Artery-Vein classification, AV ratio calculation, and vessel tortuosity measurement, all fully automated. Existing techniques tend to only work on the partial re…
Segmentation of carotid vessel wall is required in vessel wall volume (VWV) and local vessel-wall-plus-plaque thickness (VWT) quantification of the carotid artery. Manual segmentation of the vessel wall is time-consuming and prone to interobserver variability. In this paper, we proposed a convolution neural network to segment the common carotid artery (CCA) from 3D carotid ultrasound images. The proposed CNN involves three U-Nets that segmented the 3D ultrasound (3DUS) images in the axial, lateral and frontal orientations. The segmentation maps generated by three U-Nets were consolidated by a …
Vessel stenosis is a major risk factor in cardiovascular diseases (CVD). To analyze the degree of vessel stenosis for supporting the treatment management, extraction of coronary artery area from Computed Tomographic Angiography (CTA) is regarded as a key procedure. However, manual segmentation by cardiologists may be a time-consuming task, and present a significant inter-observer variation. Although various computer-aided approaches have been developed to support segmentation of coronary arteries in CTA, the results remain unreliable due to complex attenuation appearance of plaques, which are …
A topology-preserving three-stage framework for fully-connected coronary artery extraction
Center for Digital Media Computing, School of Film, School of Informatics, Xiamen University(厦门大学电影学院、信息学院数字媒体计算中心);Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University(厦门大学人工智能研究院);Peking Union Medical College Hospital(北京协和医院);Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.(上海联影智能医疗科技有限公司);City University of Hong Kong(香港城市大学);Shanghai Clinical Research and Trial Center(上海临床研究与试验中心)
We present a fully automatic, graph-based technique for extracting the retinal vascular topology -- that is, how different vessels are connected to each other -- given a single color fundus image. Determining this connectivity is very challenging because vessels cross each other in a 2D image, obscuring their true paths. We quantitatively validated the usefulness of our extraction method by using it to achieve comparable state-of-the-art results in retinal artery-vein classification. Our proposed approach works as follows: We first segment the retinal vessels using our previously developed sta…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学);Peking Union Medical College Hospital(北京协和医院)
The segmentation of coronary arteries by convolutional neural network is promising yet requires a large amount of labor-intensive manual annotations. Transferring knowledge from retinal vessels in widely-available public labeled fundus images (FIs) has a potential to reduce the annotation requirement for coronary artery segmentation in X-ray angiograms (XAs) due to their common tubular structures. However, it is challenged by the cross-anatomy domain shift due to the intrinsically different vesselness characteristics in different anatomical regions under even different imaging protocols. To so…
Improve Retinal Artery/Vein Classification via Channel Couplin
Institute of Medical Technology, Peking University Health Science Center, Peking University, Beijing, China(北京大学医学部医学技术研究所);Department of Biomedical Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China(北京大学生物医学工程系);National Biomedical Imaging Center, Peking University, Beijing, China(北京大学国家生物医学成像中心);Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology(佐治亚理工学院生物医学工程系);Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA(埃默里大学)
This study is to demonstrate deep learning for automated artery-vein (AV) classification in optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA). The AV-Net, a fully convolutional network (FCN) based on modified U-shaped CNN architecture, incorporates enface OCT and OCTA to differentiate arteries and veins. For the multi-modal training process, the enface OCT works as a near infrared fundus image to provide vessel intensity profiles, and the OCTA contains blood flow strength and vessel geometry features. A transfer learning process is also integrated to compensate for the limitation of available da…
This study is to characterize reflectance profiles of retinal blood vessels in optical coherence tomography (OCT), and to validate these vascular features to guide artery-vein classification in OCT angiography (OCTA) of human retina. Depth-resolved OCT reveals unique features of retinal arteries and veins. Retinal arteries show hyper-reflective boundaries at both upper (inner side towards the vitreous) and lower (outer side towards the choroid) walls. In contrary, retinal veins reveal hyper-reflectivity at the upper boundary only. Uniform lumen intensity was observed in both small and large ar…
Tsinghua University(清华大学);Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Capital Medical University(首都医科大学附属北京安贞医院);The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University(郑州大学第一附属医院)
Coronary angiography is an indispensable assistive technique for cardiac interventional surgery. Segmentation and extraction of blood vessels from coronary angiography videos are very essential prerequisites for physicians to locate, assess and diagnose the plaques and stenosis in blood vessels. This article proposes a new video segmentation framework that can extract the clearest and most comprehensive coronary angiography images from a video sequence, thereby helping physicians to better observe the condition of blood vessels. This framework combines a 3D convolutional layer to extract spati…
University College London(伦敦大学学院);UCL(伦敦大学学院);NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology(英国国家健康研究所摩尔菲尔德眼科医院NHS基金会信托与伦敦大学学院眼科研究所生物医学研究中心);Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences(惠康/英国工程与物理科学研究委员会介入与外科科学中心)
Estimating clinically-relevant vascular features following vessel segmentation is a standard pipeline for retinal vessel analysis, which provides potential ocular biomarkers for both ophthalmic disease and systemic disease. In this work, we integrate these clinical features into a novel vascular feature optimised loss function (VAFO-Loss), in order to regularise networks to produce segmentation maps, with which more accurate vascular features can be derived. Two common vascular features, vessel density and fractal dimension, are identified to be sensitive to intra-segment misclassification, wh…
Bioinformatics Institute, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)(新加坡科技研究局生物信息学研究所);Hwa Chong Institution (College)(华侨中学(高中部));National Heart Centre Singapore(新加坡国家心脏中心);Duke-NUS Medical School(杜克-新加坡国立大学医学院);School of Computing, National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学计算学院);Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI)(新加坡眼科研究所);Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore(新加坡康复研究所);Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, A*STAR(新加坡科技研究局生物工程与纳米技术研究所)
The evaluation of obstructions (stenosis) in coronary arteries is currently done by a physician's visual assessment of coronary angiography video sequences. It is laborious, and can be susceptible to interobserver variation. Prior studies have attempted to automate this process, but few have demonstrated an integrated suite of algorithms for the end-to-end analysis of angiograms. We report an automated analysis pipeline based on deep learning to rapidly and objectively assess coronary angiograms, highlight coronary vessels of interest, and quantify potential stenosis. We propose a 3-stage auto…
ArteryX: A Reliable End-to-End Toolbox for Standardized Intracranial Artery Feature Extraction from 3D TOF-MRA
Department of Neurology, University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学神经科部);Department of Physics, University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学物理系);Department of Imaging Sciences, University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学影像科学系);Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学电气与计算机工程系);Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学生物医学工程系)
In this report we want to present our method and results for the Carotid Artery Vessel Wall Segmentation Challenge. We propose an image-based pipeline utilizing the U-Net architecture and location priors to solve the segmentation problem at hand.
INESC-ID(里斯本系统与计算机工程研究所);Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon(里斯本大学高等技术学院);Lisbon School of Medicine, University of Lisbon(里斯本大学里斯本医学院)
Coronary X-ray angiography is a crucial clinical procedure for the diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease, which accounts for roughly 16% of global deaths every year. However, the images acquired in these procedures have low resolution and poor contrast, making lesion detection and assessment challenging. Accurate coronary artery segmentation not only helps mitigate these problems, but also allows the extraction of relevant anatomical features for further analysis by quantitative methods. Although automated segmentation of coronary arteries has been proposed before, previous approa…
DSCA: A Digital Subtraction Angiography Sequence Dataset and Spatio-Temporal Model for Cerebral Artery Segmentation
Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院宁波材料技术与工程研究所);School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Ningbo University of Technology(宁波工程学院网络空间安全学院);Shandong Artificial Intelligence Institute, Qilu University of Technology(齐鲁工业大学山东省人工智能研究院);School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University(南京大学智能科学与技术学院);Erasmus MC, University Medical Center(伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心);Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology(埃因霍温理工大学生物医学工程系);First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University(郑州大学第一附属医院)
The Ohio State University College of Medicine(俄亥俄州立大学医学院)
We propose a fully automated algorithm based on a deep learning framework enabling screening of a coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) examination for confident detection of the presence or absence of coronary artery atherosclerosis. The system starts with extracting the coronary arteries and their branches from CCTA datasets and representing them with multi-planar reformatted volumes; pre-processing and augmentation techniques are then applied to increase the robustness and generalization ability of the system. A 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) is utilized to mo…
Force Sensing Guided Artery-Vein Segmentation via Sequential Ultrasound Images
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所);School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学人工智能学院);Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, HK Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心);City University of Hong Kong(香港城市大学)
The University of Hong Kong(香港大学);Hospital Authority(医院管理局)
The hyperdense middle cerebral artery (MCA) dot sign has been reported as an important factor in the diagnosis of acute ischemic stroke due to large vessel occlusion. Interpreting the initial CT brain scan in these patients requires high level of expertise, and has high inter-observer variability. An automated computerized interpretation of the urgent CT brain image, with an emphasis to pick up early signs of ischemic stroke will facilitate early patient diagnosis, triage, and shorten the door-to-revascularization time for these group of patients. In this paper, we present an automated detecti…
Fuzhou University(福州大学);Fujian Medical University Union Hospital(福建医科大学附属协和医院)
With the development of medical computer-aided diagnostic systems, pulmonary artery-vein(A/V) separation plays a crucial role in assisting doctors in preoperative planning for lung cancer surgery. However, distinguishing arterial from venous irrigation in chest CT images remains a challenge due to the similarity and complex structure of the arteries and veins. We propose a novel method for automatic separation of pulmonary arteries and veins from chest CT images. The method consists of three parts. First, global connection information and local feature information are used to construct a compl…
Image Sciences Institute(影像科学研究所);University Medical Center Utrecht(乌得勒支大学医学中心);Department of Radiology(放射科)
Detection of coronary artery stenosis in coronary CT angiography (CCTA) requires highly personalized surface meshes enclosing the coronary lumen. In this work, we propose to use graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to predict the spatial location of vertices in a tubular surface mesh that segments the coronary artery lumen. Predictions for individual vertex locations are based on local image features as well as on features of neighboring vertices in the mesh graph. The method was trained and evaluated using the publicly available Coronary Artery Stenoses Detection and Quantification Evaluation …
ImageCAS: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Coronary Artery Segmentation based on Computed Tomography Angiography Images
Guangdong University of Technology(广东工业大学);Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences)(广东省人民医院(广东省医学科学院));Southern Medical University(南方医科大学);Missouri University of Science and Technology(密苏里科技大学)
Peripancreatic vessel segmentation and anatomical labeling play extremely important roles to assist the early diagnosis, surgery planning and prognosis for patients with pancreatic tumors. However, most current techniques cannot achieve satisfactory segmentation performance for peripancreatic veins and usually make predictions with poor integrity and connectivity. Besides, unsupervised labeling algorithms cannot deal with complex anatomical variation while fully supervised methods require a large number of voxel-wise annotations for training, which is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. T…
Coronary angiography is the "gold standard" for diagnosing coronary artery disease (CAD). At present, the methods for detecting and evaluating coronary artery stenosis cannot satisfy the clinical needs, e.g., there is no prior study of detecting stenoses in prespecified vessel segments, which is necessary in clinical practice. Two vascular stenosis detection methods are proposed to assist the diagnosis. The first one is an automatic method, which can automatically extract the entire coronary artery tree and mark all the possible stenoses. The second one is an interactive method. With this meth…
Zhejiang University(浙江大学);University of Alberta(阿尔伯塔大学)
Topological and geometrical analysis of retinal blood vessel is a cost-effective way for early detection of many common diseases. Meanwhile, automated vessel segmentation and vascular tree analysis are still lacking in terms of generalization capability. In this work, we construct a novel benchmark RETA with 81 labeled vessel masks aiming to facilitate retinal vessel analysis. A semi-automated coarse-to-fine workflow is proposed to annotating vessel pixels. During dataset construction, we strived to control inter-annotator variability and intra-annotator variability by performing multi-stage a…
University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein(石勒苏益格-荷尔斯泰因大学医院);University of Lübeck(吕贝克大学)
The first choice in diagnostic imaging for patients suffering from peripheral arterial disease is 2D ultrasound (US). However, for a proper imaging process, a skilled and experienced sonographer is required. Additionally, it is a highly user-dependent operation. A robotized US system that autonomously scans the peripheral arteries has the potential to overcome these limitations. In this work, we extend a previously proposed system by a hierarchical image analysis pipeline based on convolutional neural networks in order to control the robot. The system was evaluated by checking its feasibility …
GAPNet: Granularity Attention Network with Anatomy-Prior-Constraint for Carotid Artery Segmentation
Shandong Artificial Intelligence Institute, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)(齐鲁工业大学(山东省科学院)山东省人工智能研究院);School of Artificial Intelligence, Hebei University of Technology(河北工业大学人工智能学院);School of Computer, Electronics and Information, Guangxi University(广西大学计算机与电子信息学院);School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University(南京大学智能科学与技术学院);University Paris Dauphine, PSL Research University, CNRS, UMR 7534, CEREMADE(巴黎多芬大学(PSL研究大学)、法国国家科学研究中心UMR 7534、CEREMADE)
School of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China(中国海洋大学计算机科学与技术学院);School of Material Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China(中国海洋大学材料科学与工程学院);School of Mathematical Sciences, Ocean University of China(中国海洋大学数学科学学院);Department of Cardiology, Qilu Hospital (Qingdao), Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University(山东大学齐鲁医学院齐鲁医院(青岛)心内科)
Coronary angiography is the "gold standard" for diagnosing coronary artery disease (CAD). At present, the methods for detecting and evaluating coronary artery stenosis cannot satisfy the clinical needs, e.g., there is no prior study of detecting stenoses in prespecified vessel segments, which is necessary in clinical practice. Two vascular stenosis detection methods are proposed to assist the diagnosis. The first one is an automatic method, which can automatically extract the entire coronary artery tree and mark all the possible stenoses. The second one is an interactive method. With this meth…
Queen Mary University of London(伦敦玛丽女王大学);Barts Health NHS Trust(巴特国民保健信托基金会)
X-ray coronary angiography (XCA) is used to assess coronary artery disease and provides valuable information on lesion morphology and severity. However, XCA images are 2D and therefore limit visualisation of the vessel. 3D reconstruction of coronary vessels is possible using multiple views, however lumen border detection in current software is performed manually resulting in limited reproducibility and slow processing time. In this study we propose 3DAngioNet, a novel deep learning (DL) system that enables rapid 3D vessel mesh reconstruction using 2D XCA images from two views. Our approach lea…
Xiamen University(厦门大学);Chinese PLA General Hospital(中国人民解放军总医院);Deepwise AI Laboratory(深睿智慧人工智能实验室)
The analysis of organ vessels is essential for computer-aided diagnosis and surgical planning. But it is not a easy task since the fine-detailed connected regions of organ vessel bring a lot of ambiguity in vessel segmentation and sub-type recognition, especially for the low-contrast capillary regions. Furthermore, recent two-staged approaches would accumulate and even amplify these inaccuracies from the first-stage whole vessel segmentation into the second-stage sub-type vessel pixel-wise classification. Moreover, the scarcity of manual annotation in organ vessels poses another challenge. In …
Deepwise AI Lab(深度智耀人工智能实验室);Northwestern Polytechnical University(西北工业大学);Peking University(北京大学)
Analyzing the morphological attributes of blood vessels plays a critical role in the computer-aided diagnosis of many cardiovascular and ophthalmologic diseases. Although being extensively studied, segmentation of blood vessels, particularly thin vessels and capillaries, remains challenging mainly due to the lack of an effective interaction between local and global features. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model called PC-Net to segment retinal vessels and major arteries in 2D fundus image and 3D computed tomography angiography (CTA) scans, respectively. In PC-Net, the pyramid …
Philips Research North America(飞利浦北美研究院);Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学)
Accurate, real-time segmentation of vessel structures in ultrasound image sequences can aid in the measurement of lumen diameters and assessment of vascular diseases. This, however, remains a challenging task, particularly for extremely small vessels that are difficult to visualize. We propose to leverage the rich spatiotemporal context available in ultrasound to improve segmentation of small-scale lower-extremity arterial vasculature. We describe efficient deep learning methods that incorporate temporal, spatial, and feature-aware contextual embeddings at multiple resolution scales while join…
Vessel tracing by modeling vascular structures in 3D medical images with centerlines and radii can provide useful information for vascular health. Existing algorithms have been developed but there are certain persistent problems such as incomplete or inaccurate vessel tracing, especially in complicated vascular beds like the intracranial arteries. We propose here a deep learning based open curve active contour model (DOST) to trace vessels in 3D images. Initial curves were proposed from a centerline segmentation neural network. Then data-driven machine knowledge was used to predict the stretch…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology(南京理工大学)
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a novel imaging modality that has been widely utilized in ophthalmology and neuroscience studies to observe retinal vessels and microvascular systems. However, publicly available OCTA datasets remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce the largest and most comprehensive OCTA dataset dubbed OCTA-500, which contains OCTA imaging under two fields of view (FOVs) from 500 subjects. The dataset provides rich images and annotations including two modalities (OCT/OCTA volumes), six types of projections, four types of text labels (age / gender / eye / d…
Scaling up fine-grained intracranial vessel annotations in computed tomography angiography
Brigham and Women’s Hospital Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院布莱尔妇女医院);Khoury College of Computer Sciences Northeastern University(东北大学计算机科学学院);Washington University in St. Louis(圣路易斯华盛顿大学);Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院丹娜-法伯癌症研究院)
Generation of Structurally Realistic Retinal Fundus Images with Diffusion Models
Seoul National University College of Medicine(首尔大学医学院);Seoul National University Bundang Hospital(首尔大学盆唐医院);VUNO, Inc.(VUNO公司);Kookmin University(国民大学)
Christian Medical College Ludhiana(卢迪亚纳基督教医学院);Pacific Neuroscience Institute(太平洋神经科学研究所)
A stroke occurs when an artery in the brain ruptures and bleeds or when the blood supply to the brain is cut off. Blood and oxygen cannot reach the brain's tissues due to the rupture or obstruction resulting in tissue death. The Middle cerebral artery (MCA) is the largest cerebral artery and the most commonly damaged vessel in stroke. The quick onset of a focused neurological deficit caused by interruption of blood flow in the territory supplied by the MCA is known as an MCA stroke. Alberta stroke programme early CT score (ASPECTS) is used to estimate the extent of early ischemic changes in pa…
University of Bournemouth(伯恩茅斯大学);IDIAP Research Institute(IDIAP研究所);École de Technolgie Superieure de Montréal(蒙特利尔高等技术学院);Diagnos Inc.(Diagnos公司);CRCHUM University of Montreal Hospital Centre(蒙特利尔大学医院研究中心)
The segmentation of the retinal vasculature from eye fundus images represents one of the most fundamental tasks in retinal image analysis. Over recent years, increasingly complex approaches based on sophisticated Convolutional Neural Network architectures have been slowly pushing performance on well-established benchmark datasets. In this paper, we take a step back and analyze the real need of such complexity. Specifically, we demonstrate that a minimalistic version of a standard U-Net with several orders of magnitude less parameters, carefully trained and rigorously evaluated, closely approxi…