LTSP：用于精确气道分割的长期切片传播
LTSP: Long-Term Slice Propagation for Accurate Airway Segmentation
摘要：
目的：支气管镜介入治疗是一种广泛应用的肺部疾病的临床技术，它需要一个准确的、拓扑完整的气道图来进行定位和引导。利用气道分割方法可以从胸部CT图像中自动提取气道图。由于气道复杂的树状结构，在保持分割精度的同时保持其拓扑完整性是一项具有挑战性的任务。方法：在本文中，长期切片传播（LTSP）方法提出了准确的气道分割病理CT扫描。我们还设计了一个两阶段的端到端的分割框架，利用LTSP方法在解码过程中。阶段1用于通过编码器-解码器架构生成粗略特征图。第二阶段是采用所提出的LTSP方法来利用连续性信息并增强粗略特征图中的弱气道特征。最终的分割结果是从细化的特征图预测。结果：进行了广泛的实验，以评估所提出的方法的性能70临床CT扫描。结果表明，与一些最先进的方法相比，所提出的方法有了相当大的改进，因为大多数破损被消除，并且检测到更多的微小支气管。消融研究进一步证实了所提出的方法的组成部分的有效性。结论：切片连续性信息有助于准确分割气道。此外，通过传播长期切片特征，保持气道拓扑连接性，同时保持整体分割精度。
英文摘要：
Purpose: Bronchoscopic intervention is a widely-used clinical technique for pulmonary diseases, which requires an accurate and topological complete airway map for its localization and guidance. The airway map could be extracted from chest computed tomography (CT) scans automatically by airway segmentation methods. Due to the complex tree-like structure of the airway, preserving its topology completeness while maintaining the segmentation accuracy is a challenging task. Methods: In this paper, a long-term slice propagation (LTSP) method is proposed for accurate airway segmentation from pathological CT scans. We also design a two-stage end-to-end segmentation framework utilizing the LTSP method in the decoding process. Stage 1 is used to generate a coarse feature map by an encoder-decoder architecture. Stage 2 is to adopt the proposed LTSP method for exploiting the continuity information and enhancing the weak airway features in the coarse feature map. The final segmentation result is predicted from the refined feature map. Results: Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method on 70 clinical CT scans. The results demonstrate the considerable improvements of the proposed method compared to some state-of-the-art methods as most breakages are eliminated and more tiny bronchi are detected. The ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of the constituents of the proposed method. Conclusion: Slice continuity information is beneficial to accurate airway segmentation. Furthermore, by propagating the long-term slice feature, the airway topology connectivity is preserved with overall segmentation accuracy maintained.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
