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 jointly utilizing information from B-mode and Color Doppler signals. Evaluating on femoral and tibial artery scans performed on healthy subjects by an expert ultrasonographer, and comparing to consensus expert ground-truth annotations of inner lumen boundaries, we demonstrate real-time segmentation using the context-aware models and show that they significantly outperform comparable baseline approaches.
Robot-guided catheter insertion has the potential to deliver urgent medical care in situations where medical personnel are unavailable. However, this technique requires accurate and reliable segmentation of anatomical landmarks in the body. For the ultrasound imaging modality, obtaining large amounts of training data for a segmentation model is time-consuming and expensive. This paper introduces RESUS (RESlicing of UltraSound Images), a weak supervision data augmentation technique for ultrasound images based on slicing reconstructed 3D volumes from tracked 2D images. This technique allows us t…
Volume visualization is a method that displays three-dimensional (3D) data in two-dimensional (2D) space. Using 3D datasets instead of 2D traditional images improves the visualization of anatomical structures, and volume visualization helps radiologists and surgeons to review large datasets comprehensively so that diagnosis and treatment can be enhanced. In liver surgery, blood vessel detection is important. Liver vessels have various shapes and due to the presence of noise in the ultrasound images, they can be confused with noise. Suboptimal images can sometimes lead to surgical errors where …
Accurate hepatic vessel segmentation on ultrasound (US) images can be an important tool in the planning and execution of surgery, however proves to be a challenging task due to noise and speckle. Our method comprises a reduced filter 3D U-Net implementation to automatically detect hepatic vasculature in 3D US volumes. A comparison is made between volumes acquired with a 3D probe and stacked 2D US images based on electromagnetic tracking. Experiments are conducted on 67 scans, where 45 are used in training, 12 in validation and 10 in testing. This network architecture yields Dice scores of 0.74…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Johns Hopkins Medical Institute（约翰斯·霍普金斯医学研究所）
Clear identification of bone structures is crucial for ultrasound-guided lumbar interventions, but it can be challenging due to the complex shapes of the self-shadowing vertebra anatomy and the extensive background speckle noise from the surrounding soft tissue structures. Therefore, we propose to use a patch-like wearable ultrasound solution to capture the reflective bone surfaces from multiple imaging angles and create 3D bone representations for interventional guidance. In this work, we will present our method for estimating the vertebra bone surfaces by using a spatiotemporal U-Net archite…
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 …
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 …
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）
High-Fidelity Functional Ultrasound Reconstruction via A Visual Auto-Regressive Framework
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（深圳先进技术研究院，中国科学院）；Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau（计算机与信息科学系，澳门大学）
Department of Internal medicine, National Taiwan University（台湾大学医学院）；department of medicine, national Taiwan University（台湾大学医学院）；department of internal medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital（台湾大学医学院附设医院）；department of medicine, National Taiwan University Cancer center（台湾大学医学院癌症中心）
The purpose of this study is to differentiate malignant and benign mediastinal lesions by using the three-dimensional convolutional neural network through the endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) image. Compared with previous study, our proposed model is robust to noise and able to fuse various imaging features and spatiotemporal features of EBUS videos. Endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) is a diagnostic tool for intrathoracic lymph nodes. Physician can observe the characteristics of the lesion using grayscale mode, doppler mode, and elastography during the…
Detection of relative changes in circulating blood volume is important to guide resuscitation and manage variety of medical conditions including sepsis, trauma, dialysis and congestive heart failure. Recent studies have shown that estimates of circulating blood volume can be obtained from ultrasound imagery of the of the internal jugular vein (IJV). However, segmentation and tracking of the IJV is significantly influenced by speckle noise and shadowing which introduce uncertainty in the boundaries of the vessel. In this paper, we investigate the use of optical flow algorithms for segmentation …
A novel framework for fully-automated co-registration of intravascular ultrasound and optical coherence tomography imaging data
Barts Health NHS Trust（巴茨健康国民医疗服务信托）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Queen Mary, University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Queen Mary University London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；CHU Hospital（里昂大学医疗中心）
Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is an intra-operative imaging modality that facilitates observing and appraising the vessel wall structure of the human coronary arteries. Segmentation of arterial wall boundaries from the IVUS images is not only crucial for quantitative analysis of the vessel walls and plaque characteristics, but is also necessary for generating 3D reconstructed models of the artery. The aim of this study is twofold. Firstly, we investigate the feasibility of using a recently proposed region detector, namely Extremal Region of Extremum Level (EREL) to delineate the luminal and …
Ultrasound imaging provides information from a large part of the muscle. It has recently been shown that ultrafast ultrasound imaging can be used to record and analyze the mechanical response of individual MUs using blind source separation. In this work, we present an alternative method - a deep learning pipeline - to identify active MUs in ultrasound image sequences, including segmentation of their territories and signal estimation of their mechanical responses (twitch train). We train and evaluate the model using simulated data mimicking the complex activation pattern of tens of activated MU…
Objective: Vessel-wall-volume (VWV) and localized vessel-wall-thickness (VWT) measured from 3D ultrasound (US) carotid images are sensitive to anti-atherosclerotic effects of medical/dietary treatments. VWV and VWT measurements require the lumen-intima (LIB) and media-adventitia boundaries (MAB) at the common and internal carotid arteries (CCA and ICA). However, most existing segmentation techniques were capable of automating only CCA segmentation. An approach capable of segmenting the MAB and LIB from the CCA and ICA was required to accelerate VWV and VWT quantification. Methods: Segmentation…
In ultrasound shear wave elasticity (SWE) imaging, a number of algorithms exist for estimating the shear wave speed (SWS) from spatiotemporal displacement data. However, no method provides a well-calibrated and practical uncertainty metric, hindering SWE's clinical adoption and utility in downstream decision-making. Here, we designed a deep learning SWS estimator that simultaneously outputs a quantitative and well-calibrated uncertainty value for each estimate. Our deep neural network (DNN) takes as input a single 2D spatiotemporal plane of tracked displacement data and outputs the two paramet…
Vascular Segmentation of Functional Ultrasound Images using Deep Learning
AIstroSight；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化技术研究院）；Hospices Civils de Lyon（里昂慈善医院）；University Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；Lyon Neuroscience Research Center（里昂神经科学研究中心）
The 4D Human Embryonic Brain Atlas: spatiotemporal atlas generation for rapid anatomical changes
Erasmus MC（埃拉斯姆斯医学院）；University Medical Center Groningen（格罗宁根大学医学中心）；Amsterdam UMC location University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学阿姆斯特丹医学中心分部）；Amsterdam Reproduction and Development research institute（阿姆斯特丹生殖与发育研究所）
LOTUS: Learning to Optimize Task-based US representations
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Stanford University School of Medicine（斯坦福大学医学院）；Ecole Centrale Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；John Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Helmholtz Zentrum München（慕尼黑亥姆霍兹中心）；rechts der Isar University Hospital（伊萨尔河右岸大学医院）
Ultrasound (US) is one of the most common medical imaging modalities since it is radiation-free, low-cost, and real-time. In freehand US examinations, sonographers often navigate a US probe to visualize standard examination planes with rich diagnostic information. However, reproducibility and stability of the resulting images often suffer from intra- and inter-operator variation. Reinforcement learning (RL), as an interaction-based learning method, has demonstrated its effectiveness in visual navigating tasks; however, RL is limited in terms of generalization. To address this challenge, we pro…
IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) is one of the most effective imaging modalities that provides assistance to experts in order to diagnose and treat cardiovascular diseases. We address a central problem in IVUS image analysis with Fully Convolutional Network (FCN): automatically delineate the lumen and media-adventitia borders in IVUS images, which is crucial to shorten the diagnosis process or benefits a faster and more accurate 3D reconstruction of the artery. Particularly, we propose an FCN architecture, called IVUS-Net, followed by a post-processing contour extraction step, in order to autom…
National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院医学院国家心肺研究所）；Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院工程系生物工程系）；Royal Brompton Hospital（皇家布朗普顿医院）
Various structures in human physiology follow a treelike morphology, which often expresses complexity at very fine scales. Examples of such structures are intrathoracic airways, retinal blood vessels, and hepatic blood vessels. Large collections of 2D and 3D images have been made available by medical imaging modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), Optical coherence tomography (OCT) and ultrasound in which the spatial arrangement can be observed. Segmentation of these structures in medical imaging is of great importance since the analysis of the structure …
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；City, University of London（伦敦城市大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
Deep learning has become the most widely used approach for cardiac image segmentation in recent years. In this paper, we provide a review of over 100 cardiac image segmentation papers using deep learning, which covers common imaging modalities including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and ultrasound (US) and major anatomical structures of interest (ventricles, atria and vessels). In addition, a summary of publicly available cardiac image datasets and code repositories are included to provide a base for encouraging reproducible research. Finally, we discuss the chall…
Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) offers a cost-effective modality for microvascular imaging by using intravascular contrast agents (microbubbles). However, ULM has a fundamental trade-off between acquisition time and spatial resolution, which makes clinical translation challenging. In this paper, in order to circumvent the trade-off, we introduce a spatiotemporal filtering operation dubbed velocity filtering, which is capable of separating contrast agents into different groups based on their vector velocities thus reducing interference in the localization step, while simultaneously off…
Deep Spatiotemporal Clutter Filtering of Transthoracic Echocardiographic Images: Leveraging Contextual Attention and Residual Learning
Cardiovascular Imaging and Dynamics, Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, KU Leuven（心血管影像与动力学，心血管科学系，KU莱顿大学）；Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Medicine, University of Minho（生命与健康科学研究所（ICVS），医学院，蒙德兹大学）；Ai–School of Technology, IPCA（2Ai技术学院，IPCA）；Department of Cardiac Technology, College of Applied Medical Sciences, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University（心脏技术系，应用医学科学学院，伊玛目阿卜杜勒拉赫曼·本·法伊兹大学）
Automated surface segmentation is important and challenging in many medical image analysis applications. Recent deep learning based methods have been developed for various object segmentation tasks. Most of them are a classification based approach, e.g. U-net, which predicts the probability of being target object or background for each voxel. One problem of those methods is lacking of topology guarantee for segmented objects, and usually post processing is needed to infer the boundary surface of the object. In this paper, a novel model based on convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by a …
