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 squeeze-and-excitation (PSE) module introduces spatial information to each convolutional block, boosting its ability to extract more effective multi-scale features, and the coarse-to-fine (CF) module replaces the conventional decoder to enhance the details of thin vessels and process hard-to-classify pixels again. We evaluated our PC-Net on the Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction (DRIVE) database and an in-house 3D major artery (3MA) database against several recent methods. Our results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PSE module and CF module, but also suggest that our proposed PC-Net sets new state of the art in the segmentation of retinal vessels (AUC: 98.31%) and major arteries (AUC: 98.35%) on both databases, respectively.
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织）；Prince of Wales Hospital（威尔士亲王医院）
Cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) is a major vascular contributor to cognitive impairment in ageing, including dementias. Imaging remains the most promising method for in vivo studies of CSVD. To replace the subjective and laborious visual rating approaches, emerging studies have applied state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to extract imaging biomarkers of CSVD from MRI scans. We aimed to summarise published computer-aided methods to examine three imaging biomarkers of CSVD, namely cerebral microbleeds (CMB), dilated perivascular spaces (PVS), and lacunes of presumed vascular origin. Se…
DeformCL: Learning Deformable Centerline Representation for Vessel Extraction in 3D Medical Image
Yizhun Medical AI Co., Ltd（亿智臻医疗人工智能有限公司）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；Center for Machine Learning Research, Peking University（北京大学机器学习研究中心）；State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学人工智能国家重点实验室）；Pazhou Laboratory (Huangpu), Guangzhou, Guangdong, China（琶洲实验室（黄埔），广州，广东，中国）
Semi-overcomplete convolutional auto-encoder embedding as shape priors for deep vessel segmentation
LaTIM UMR 1101, Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院LaTIM UMR 1101研究所）；University of Western Brittany（西布列塔尼大学）；University Hospital of Brest（布雷斯特大学医院）；University Hospital of Poitiers（普瓦捷大学医院）；ICube UMR 7357, CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心ICube UMR 7357研究所）；IMT Atlantique（大西洋电信学院）
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…
Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学））；ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学）ITER学院）；Center for the Internet of Things, ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学）ITER学院物联网中心）
Extracting blood vessels from retinal fundus images plays a decisive role in diagnosing the progression in pertinent diseases. In medical image analysis, vessel extraction is a semantic binary segmentation problem, where blood vasculature needs to be extracted from the background. Here, we present an image enhancement technique based on the morphological preprocessing coupled with a scaled U-net architecture. Despite a relatively less number of trainable network parameters, the scaled version of U-net architecture provides better performance compare to other methods in the domain. We validated…
Seoul Nat’l Univ.（首尔国立大学）；Soonchunhyang Univ.（顺天乡大学）；Hankuk Univ. of Foreign Studies（韩国外国语大学）
We present a method to extract coronary vessels from fluoroscopic x-ray sequences. Given the vessel structure for the source frame, vessel correspondence candidates in the subsequent frame are generated by a novel hierarchical search scheme to overcome the aperture problem. Optimal correspondences are determined within a Markov random field optimization framework. Post-processing is performed to extract vessel branches newly visible due to the inflow of contrast agent. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation conducted on a dataset of 18 sequences demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed …
Automating the extraction and quantification of features from three-dimensional (3-D) image stacks is a critical task for advancing computer vision research. The union of 3-D image acquisition and analysis enables the quantification of biological resistance of a plant tissue to fungal infection through the analysis of attributes such as fungal penetration depth, fungal mass, and branching of the fungal network of connected cells. From an image processing perspective, these tasks reduce to segmentation of vessel-like structures and the extraction of features from their skeletonization. In order…
An automated framework for brain vessel centerline extraction from CTA images
Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能与机器人研究所）；Department of Radiology, Erasmus MC（伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心放射科）；Department of Radiology, Maastricht UMC（马斯特里赫特大学医学中心放射科）；Faculty of Applied Sciences, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学应用科学学院）
Peking University（北京大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Deepwise AI Lab（深智城人工智能实验室）
Automatic blood vessel extraction from 3D medical images is crucial for vascular disease diagnoses. Existing methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) may suffer from discontinuities of extracted vessels when segmenting such thin tubular structures from 3D images. We argue that preserving the continuity of extracted vessels requires to take into account the global geometry. However, 3D convolutions are computationally inefficient, which prohibits the 3D CNNs from sufficiently large receptive fields to capture the global cues in the entire image. In this work, we propose a hybrid re…
ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（ITER，锡克沙·奥·阿努桑德汉（被视为大学））
In the medical domain, different computer-aided diagnosis systems have been proposed to extract blood vessels from retinal fundus images for the clinical treatment of vascular diseases. Accurate extraction of blood vessels from the fundus images using a computer-generated method can help the clinician to produce timely and accurate reports for the patient suffering from these diseases. In this article, we integrate top-hat based preprocessing approach with fine-tuned B-COSFIRE filter to achieve more accurate segregation of blood vessel pixels from the background. The use of top-hat transformat…
Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science & Technology（维迪亚西里梅迪科技学院）；Kamnoetvidya Science Academy（卡姆诺维迪亚科学学院）；Ningbo Institute of Industrial Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院宁波工业技术研究院）；Cixi Institute of Biomedical Engineering（慈溪生物医学工程研究所）；Kasetsart University（泰国农业大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
While there have been increased researches using deep learning techniques for the extraction of vascular structure from the 2D en face OCTA, for such approach, it is known that the data annotation process on the curvilinear structure like the retinal vasculature is very costly and time consuming, albeit few tried to address the annotation problem. In this work, we propose the application of the scribble-base weakly-supervised learning method to automate the pixel-level annotation. The proposed method, called OCTAve, combines the weakly-supervised learning using scribble-annotated ground truth …
FS-Net: Full Scale Network and Adaptive Threshold for Improving Extraction of Micro-Retinal Vessel Structures
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech)（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院（斯科尔泰克））；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AIRI)（人工智能研究院（AIRI））；University of Sharjah（沙迦大学）；Bian Que AI（扁鹊人工智能）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Research Institute for Medical and Health Sciences（医学与健康科学研究院）
Cascaded multitask U-Net using topological loss for vessel segmentation and centerline extraction
Université de Reims Champagne Ardenne（兰斯香槟阿登大学）；Univ Lyon（里昂大学）；INSA-Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）；Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；UJM-Saint Etienne（圣埃蒂安大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；CREATIS（CREATIS研究院）
School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）；School of Continuing Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学继续教育学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital（上海交通大学附属第六人民医院）；Ren Ji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学院附属仁济医院）；Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校高级神经影像中心）
Although robust PCA has been increasingly adopted to extract vessels from X-ray coronary angiography (XCA) images, challenging problems such as inefficient vessel-sparsity modelling, noisy and dynamic background artefacts, and high computational cost still remain unsolved. Therefore, we propose a novel robust PCA unrolling network with sparse feature selection for super-resolution XCA vessel imaging. Being embedded within a patch-wise spatiotemporal super-resolution framework that is built upon a pooling layer and a convolutional long short-term memory network, the proposed network can not onl…
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）
Systemic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis are among the leading causes of annual human mortality rate. It is suggested that retinal and conjunctival vascular tortuosity is a potential biomarker for such systemic diseases. Most importantly, it is observed that the tortuosity depends on the thickness of these vessels. Therefore, selective calculation of tortuosity within specific vessel thicknesses is required depending on the disease being analysed. In this paper, we propose a thickness sensitive vessel extraction framework that is primarily applicable for studies relate…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital（上海交通大学附属第六人民医院）；Ren Ji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学院仁济医院）；UC Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）
Video decomposition is very important to extract moving foreground objects from complex backgrounds in computer vision, machine learning, and medical imaging, e.g., extracting moving contrast-filled vessels from the complex and noisy backgrounds of X-ray coronary angiography (XCA). However, the challenges caused by dynamic backgrounds, overlapping heterogeneous environments and complex noises still exist in video decomposition. To solve these problems, this study is the first to introduce a flexible visual working memory model in video decomposition tasks to provide interpretable and high-perf…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）
Deep learning approaches may help radiologists in the early diagnosis and timely treatment of cerebrovascular diseases. Accurate cerebral vessel segmentation of Time-of-Flight Magnetic Resonance Angiographs (TOF-MRAs) is an essential step in this process. This study investigates deep learning approaches for automatic, fast and accurate cerebrovascular segmentation for TOF-MRAs. The performance of several data augmentation and selection methods for training a 2D and 3D U-Net for vessel segmentation was investigated in five experiments: a) without augmentation, b) Gaussian blur, c) rotation and …
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)（孟加拉国工程技术大学（BUET））；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Successful identification of blood vessel blockage is a crucial step for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. These blocks can be identified from the spatial and time-depth variable Two-Photon Excitation Microscopy (TPEF) images of the brain blood vessels using machine learning methods. In this study, we propose several preprocessing schemes to improve the performance of these methods. Our method includes 3D-point cloud data extraction from image modality and their feature-space fusion to leverage complementary information inherent in different modalities. We also enforce the learned representation …
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital with Nanjing Medical University（南京医科大学第一附属医院）
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a novel non-invasive imaging modality that allows micron-level resolution to visualize the retinal microvasculature. The retinal vessel segmentation in OCTA images is still an open problem, and especially the thin and dense structure of the capillary plexus is an important challenge of this problem. In this work, we propose a novel image magnification network (IMN) for vessel segmentation in OCTA images. Contrary to the U-Net structure with a down-sampling encoder and up-sampling decoder, the proposed IMN adopts the design of up-sampling encod…
Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）；Cixi Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院慈溪生物医学工程研究所）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；UBTech Research, UBTech Robotics Corp Ltd（优必选机器人有限公司优必选研究院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
The detection of retinal vessel is of great importance in the diagnosis and treatment of many ocular diseases. Many methods have been proposed for vessel detection. However, most of the algorithms neglect the connectivity of the vessels, which plays an important role in the diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel method for retinal vessel detection. The proposed method includes a dense dilated network to get an initial detection of the vessels and a probability regularized walk algorithm to address the fracture issue in the initial detection. The dense dilated network integrates newly pro…
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…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；Eötvös Loránd University（厄特沃什·罗兰大学）；Shenyang Aerospace University（沈阳航空航天大学）
Retinal vessel segmentation plays an imaportant role in the field of retinal image analysis because changes in retinal vascular structure can aid in the diagnosis of diseases such as hypertension and diabetes. In recent research, numerous successful segmentation methods for fundus images have been proposed. But for other retinal imaging modalities, more research is needed to explore vascular extraction. In this work, we propose an efficient method to segment blood vessels in Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO) retinal images. Inspired by U-Net, "feature map reuse" and residual learning, we pro…
Bahcesehir University（巴赫切谢希尔大学）；American University of Malta（马耳他美国大学）
Clinical screening with low-quality fundus images is challenging and significantly leads to misdiagnosis. This paper addresses the issue of improving the retinal image quality and vessel segmentation through retinal image restoration. More specifically, a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) with a convolution block attention module (CBAM) is used for retinal image restoration. A modified UNet is used for retinal vessel segmentation for the restored retinal images (CBAM-UNet). The proposed model consists of two generators and two discriminators. Generators translate image…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
Sturge-Weber syndrome (SWS) is a vascular malformation disease, and it may cause blindness if the patient's condition is severe. Clinical results show that SWS can be divided into two types based on the characteristics of scleral blood vessels. Therefore, how to accurately segment scleral blood vessels has become a significant problem in computer-aided diagnosis. In this research, we propose to continuously upsample the bottom layer's feature maps to preserve image details, and design a novel Claw UNet based on UNet for scleral blood vessel segmentation. Specifically, the residual structure is…
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…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）
The precise segmentation of retinal blood vessels is of great significance for early diagnosis of eye-related diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. In this work, we propose a lightweight network named Spatial Attention U-Net (SA-UNet) that does not require thousands of annotated training samples and can be utilized in a data augmentation manner to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. SA-UNet introduces a spatial attention module which infers the attention map along the spatial dimension, and multiplies the attention map by the input feature map for adaptive feature refin…
Extensive research in neural style transfer methods has shown that the correlation between features extracted by a pre-trained VGG network has a remarkable ability to capture the visual style of an image. Surprisingly, however, this stylization quality is not robust and often degrades significantly when applied to features from more advanced and lightweight networks, such as those in the ResNet family. By performing extensive experiments with different network architectures, we find that residual connections, which represent the main architectural difference between VGG and ResNet, produce fea…
Retinal vessel segmentation is a crucial step in diagnosing and screening various diseases, including diabetes, ophthalmologic diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method for vessel segmentation in color fundus images using encoder-decoder based octave convolution networks. Compared with other convolution networks utilizing standard convolution for feature extraction, the proposed method utilizes octave convolutions and octave transposed convolutions for learning multiple-spatial-frequency features, thus can better capture retinal vasculat…
We propose an encoder-decoder framework for the segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images that relies on the extraction of large-scale patches at multiple image-scales during training. Experiments on three fundus image datasets demonstrate that this approach achieves state-of-the-art results and can be implemented using a simple and efficient fully-convolutional network with a parameter count of less than 0.8M. Furthermore, we show that this framework - called VLight - avoids overfitting to specific training images and generalizes well across different datasets, which makes it highly sui…
Existing methods to reconstruct vascular structures from a computed tomography (CT) angiogram rely on injection of intravenous contrast to enhance the radio-density within the vessel lumen. However, pathological changes can be present in the blood lumen, vessel wall or a combination of both that prevent accurate reconstruction. In the example of aortic aneurysmal disease, a blood clot or thrombus adherent to the aortic wall within the expanding aneurysmal sac is present in 70-80% of cases. These deformations prevent the automatic extraction of vital clinically relevant information by current m…
A large number of retinal vessel analysis methods based on image segmentation have emerged in recent years. However, existing methods depend on cumbersome backbones, such as VGG16 and ResNet-50, benefiting from their powerful feature extraction capabilities but suffering from high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network (HybridNetSeg) dedicated to solving this drawback while further improving overall performance. Considering deformable convolution can extract complex and variable structural information, and larger kernel in mixed depthwise convolution makes contri…
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…
Scale-specific auxiliary multi-task contrastive learning for deep liver vessel segmentation
LaTIM UMR 1101（拉蒂姆UMR 1101机构）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；University of Western Brittany（西布列塔尼大学）；University Hospital of Brest（布雷斯特大学医院）；University Hospital of Poitiers（普瓦捷大学医院）；ICube UMR 7357（ICube UMR 7357机构）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；IMT Atlantique（大西洋电信学院）
The Computer-Assisted Diagnosis systems could save workloads and give objective diagnostic to ophthalmologists. At first, feature extraction is a fundamental step. One of these retinal features is the fovea. The fovea is a small fossa on the fundus. The main vessels diverge from the optic nerve head and follow a specific course that can be geometrically modeled as a parabola, with a common vertex inside the optic nerve head and the fovea located along the apex of this parabola curve. Therefore, based on this assumption, the main retinal blood vessels are segmented and fitted to a parabolic mod…
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…
Accurate segmentation of cerebral vasculature and a quantitative assessment of cerebrovascular morphology is critical to various diagnostic and therapeutic purposes and is pertinent to studying brain health and disease. However, this is still a challenging task due to the complexity of the vascular imaging data. We propose an automated method for cerebral vascular segmentation without the need of any manual intervention as well as a method to skeletonize the binary volume to extract vascular geometric features which can characterize vessel structure. We combine a probabilistic vessel-enhancing…
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）
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）
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 …
