Retinal artery/vein (A/V) classification lays the foundation for the quantitative analysis of retinal vessels, which is associated with potential risks of various cardiovascular and cerebral diseases. The topological connection relationship, which has been proved effective in improving the A/V classification performance for the conventional graph based method, has not been exploited by the deep learning based method. In this paper, we propose a Topology Ranking Generative Adversarial Network (TR-GAN) to improve the topology connectivity of the segmented arteries and veins, and further to boost the A/V classification performance. A topology ranking discriminator based on ordinal regression is proposed to rank the topological connectivity level of the ground-truth, the generated A/V mask and the intentionally shuffled mask. The ranking loss is further back-propagated to the generator to generate better connected A/V masks. In addition, a topology preserving module with triplet loss is also proposed to extract the high-level topological features and further to narrow the feature distance between the predicted A/V mask and the ground-truth. The proposed framework effectively increases the topological connectivity of the predicted A/V masks and achieves state-of-the-art A/V classification performance on the publicly available AV-DRIVE dataset.
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）
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…
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…
Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学机器人研究所）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Guizhou University（贵州大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Shanghai Chest Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学附属胸科医院）；Université de Lyon, INSA Lyon, CREATIS, CNRS, INSERM（里昂大学、里昂国立应用科学学院、CREATIS实验室、法国国家科学研究中心、法国国家健康与医学研究院）
Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for segmentation of pulmonary airway, artery, and vein is challenging due to sparse supervisory signals caused by the severe class imbalance between tubular targets and background. We present a CNNs-based method for accurate airway and artery-vein segmentation in non-contrast computed tomography. It enjoys superior sensitivity to tenuous peripheral bronchioles, arterioles, and venules. The method first uses a feature recalibration module to make the best use of features learned from the neural networks. Spatial information of features is properly i…
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）
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Centro de Investigación CITIC（CITIC研究中心）；Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC)（拉科鲁尼亚生物医学研究所（INIBIC））
The study of the retinal vasculature is a fundamental stage in the screening and diagnosis of many diseases. A complete retinal vascular analysis requires to segment and classify the blood vessels of the retina into arteries and veins (A/V). Early automatic methods approached these segmentation and classification tasks in two sequential stages. However, currently, these tasks are approached as a joint semantic segmentation task, as the classification results highly depend on the effectiveness of the vessel segmentation. In that regard, we propose a novel approach for the simultaneous segmentat…
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）
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Stein Eye Institute（斯坦眼科研究所）；VoxelCloud, Inc.（体素云公司）
The retinal vasculature provides important clues in the diagnosis and monitoring of systemic diseases including hypertension and diabetes. The microvascular system is of primary involvement in such conditions, and the retina is the only anatomical site where the microvasculature can be directly observed. The objective assessment of retinal vessels has long been considered a surrogate biomarker for systemic vascular diseases, and with recent advancements in retinal imaging and computer vision technologies, this topic has become the subject of renewed attention. In this paper, we present a novel…
Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London（伦敦大学学院医学影像计算中心）；Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, UCL（伦敦大学学院医学物理与生物医学工程系）；NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital（莫菲尔德眼科医院NIHR生物医学研究中心）；Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences（惠康/EPSRC介入与外科科学中心）；Research Center for Healthcare Data Science, Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室医疗健康数据科学研究中心）；UCL Respiratory, University College London（伦敦大学学院呼吸病学中心）；UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London（伦敦大学学院眼科学研究所）
Accurate multi-class segmentation is a long-standing challenge in medical imaging, especially in scenarios where classes share strong similarity. Segmenting retinal blood vessels in retinal photographs is one such scenario, in which arteries and veins need to be identified and differentiated from each other and from the background. Intra-segment misclassification, i.e. veins classified as arteries or vice versa, frequently occurs when arteries and veins intersect, whereas in binary retinal vessel segmentation, error rates are much lower. We thus propose a new approach that decomposes multi-cla…
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…
Automated anatomy-based post-processing reduces false positives and improved interpretability of deep learning intracranial aneurysm detection
Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布列根和妇女医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Dana-Farber Cancer Institute（丹娜-法伯癌症研究所）；Washing University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University（广州医科大学附属第一医院）
The status of retinal arteriovenous crossing is of great significance for clinical evaluation of arteriolosclerosis and systemic hypertension. As an ophthalmology diagnostic criteria, Scheie's classification has been used to grade the severity of arteriolosclerosis. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to support the diagnosis process, which, to the best of our knowledge, is one of the earliest attempts in medical imaging. The proposed pipeline is three-fold. First, we adopt segmentation and classification models to automatically obtain vessels in a retinal image with the corresp…
