Vessel segmentation in medical images is one of the important tasks in the diagnosis of vascular diseases and therapy planning. Although learning-based segmentation approaches have been extensively studied, a large amount of ground-truth labels are required in supervised methods and confusing background structures make neural networks hard to segment vessels in an unsupervised manner. To address this, here we introduce a novel diffusion adversarial representation learning (DARL) model that leverages a denoising diffusion probabilistic model with adversarial learning, and apply it to vessel segmentation. In particular, for self-supervised vessel segmentation, DARL learns the background signal using a diffusion module, which lets a generation module effectively provide vessel representations. Also, by adversarial learning based on the proposed switchable spatially-adaptive denormalization, our model estimates synthetic fake vessel images as well as vessel segmentation masks, which further makes the model capture vessel-relevant semantic information. Once the proposed model is trained, the model generates segmentation masks in a single step and can be applied to general vascular structure segmentation of coronary angiography and retinal images. Experimental results on various datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing unsupervised and self-supervised vessel segmentation methods.
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…
In recent years, several automatic segmentation methods have been proposed for blood vessels in retinal fundus images, ranging from using cheap and fast trainable filters to complicated neural networks and even deep learning. One example of a filted-based segmentation method is B-COSFIRE. In this approach the image filter is trained with example prototype patterns, to which the filter becomes selective by finding points in a Difference of Gaussian response on circles around the center with large intensity variation. In this paper we discuss and evaluate several of these vessel segmentation met…
University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；Istanbul Medipol University（伊斯坦布尔梅迪波尔大学）；University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）
The vascular structure of blood vessels is important in diagnosing retinal conditions such as glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Accurate segmentation of these vessels can help in detecting retinal objects such as the optic disc and optic cup and hence determine if there are damages to these areas. Moreover, the structure of the vessels can help in diagnosing glaucoma. The rapid development of digital imaging and computer-vision techniques has increased the potential for developing approaches for segmenting retinal vessels. In this paper, we propose an approach for segmenting retinal vessels t…
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…
Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；Lions Eye Institute（狮子眼科研究所）；Vitreous Retina Macula Consultants of New York（纽约玻璃体视网膜黄斑 Consultants）；Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital（曼哈顿眼耳鼻喉医院）；University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）
Automatic quantification of perifoveal vessel densities in optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A) images face challenges such as variable intra- and inter-image signal to noise ratios, projection artefacts from outer vasculature layers, and motion artefacts. This study demonstrates the utility of deep neural networks for automatic quantification of foveal avascular zone (FAZ) parameters and perifoveal vessel density of OCT-A images in healthy and diabetic eyes. OCT-A images of the foveal region were acquired using three OCT-A systems: a 1060nm Swept Source (SS)-OCT prototype, RTVue X…
Accurate visualization of liver tumors and their surrounding blood vessels is essential for noninvasive diagnosis and prognosis prediction of tumors. In medical image segmentation, there is still a lack of in-depth research on the simultaneous segmentation of liver tumors and peritumoral blood vessels. To this end, we collect the first liver tumor, and vessel segmentation benchmark datasets containing 52 portal vein phase computed tomography images with liver, liver tumor, and vessel annotations. In this case, we propose a 3D U-shaped Cross-Attention Network (UCA-Net) that utilizes a tailored …
Optimized Vessel Segmentation: A Structure-Agnostic Approach with Small Vessel Enhancement and Morphological Correction
Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging（保罗·C·劳特伯生物医学成像研究中心）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术研究院）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Cixi Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Ningbo Institute of Industrial Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院宁波工业技术研究院慈溪生物医学工程研究所）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California（南加州大学凯克医学院）；First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University（温州医科大学附属第一医院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCT-A) is a non-invasive imaging technique, and has been increasingly used to image the retinal vasculature at capillary level resolution. However, automated segmentation of retinal vessels in OCT-A has been under-studied due to various challenges such as low capillary visibility and high vessel complexity, despite its significance in understanding many eye-related diseases. In addition, there is no publicly available OCT-A dataset with manually graded vessels for training and validation. To address these issues, for the first time in the field of reti…
Deep vessel segmentation with joint multi-prior encoding
LaTIM UMR 1101；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）；CONICET（阿根廷国家科学技术研究委员会）；ICube UMR 7357；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；IMT Atlantique（大西洋电信学院）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Accurate retinal vessel segmentation is a challenging problem in color fundus image analysis. An automatic retinal vessel segmentation system can effectively facilitate clinical diagnosis and ophthalmological research. Technically, this problem suffers from various degrees of vessel thickness, perception of details, and contextual feature fusion. For addressing these challenges, a deep learning based method has been proposed and several customized modules have been integrated into the well-known encoder-decoder architecture U-net, which is mainly employed in medical image segmentation. Structu…
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 …
Heritage Institute of Technology（遗产理工学院）；Tata Consultancy Services（塔塔咨询服务公司）
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a complication of long-standing, unchecked diabetes and one of the leading causes of blindness in the world. This paper focuses on improved and robust methods to extract some of the features of DR, viz. Blood Vessels and Exudates. Blood vessels are segmented using multiple morphological and thresholding operations. For the segmentation of exudates, k-means clustering and contour detection on the original images are used. Extensive noise reduction is performed to remove false positives from the vessel segmentation algorithm's results. The localization of Optic Disc …
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）
SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Purpose: Segmentation of liver vessels from CT images is indispensable prior to surgical planning and aroused broad range of interests in the medical image analysis community. Due to the complex structure and low contrast background, automatic liver vessel segmentation remains particularly challenging. Most of the related researches adopt FCN, U-net, and V-net variants as a backbone. However, these methods mainly focus on capturing multi-scale local features which may produce misclassified voxels due to the convolutional operator's limited locality reception field. Methods: We propose a robust…
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Retinal vessel information is helpful in retinal disease screening and diagnosis. Retinal vessel segmentation provides useful information about vessels and can be used by physicians during intraocular surgery and retinal diagnostic operations. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are powerful tools for classification and segmentation of medical images. Complexity of CNNs makes it difficult to implement them in portable devices such as binocular indirect ophthalmoscopes. In this paper a simplification approach is proposed for CNNs based on combination of quantization and pruning. Fully connecte…
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique widely used for ophthalmology. It can be extended to OCT angiography (OCT-A), which reveals the retinal vasculature with improved contrast. Recent deep learning algorithms produced promising vascular segmentation results; however, 3D retinal vessel segmentation remains difficult due to the lack of manually annotated training data. We propose a learning-based method that is only supervised by a self-synthesized modality named local intensity fusion (LIF). LIF is a capillary-enhanced volume computed directly from the input OC…
Shantou University（汕头大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）
In this paper, a hierarchical image matting model is proposed to extract blood vessels from fundus images. More specifically, a hierarchical strategy utilizing the continuity and extendibility of retinal blood vessels is integrated into the image matting model for blood vessel segmentation. Normally the matting models require the user specified trimap, which separates the input image into three regions manually: the foreground, background and unknown regions. However, since creating a user specified trimap is a tedious and time-consuming task, region features of blood vessels are used to gener…
JIS College of Engineering（JIS工程学院）；Kalyani Govt. Engineering College（卡利亚尼政府工程学院）
Segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images provides early diagnosis of diseases like glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration. Among these diseases occurrence of Glaucoma is most frequent and has serious ocular consequences that can even lead to blindness, if it is not detected early. The clinical criteria for the diagnosis of glaucoma include intraocular pressure measurement, optic nerve head evaluation, retinal nerve fiber layer and visual field defects. This form of blood vessel segmentation helps in early detection for ophthalmic diseases, and potentially reduces the ri…
Existing supervised approaches didn't make use of the low-level features which are actually effective to this task. And another deficiency is that they didn't consider the relation between pixels, which means effective features are not extracted. In this paper, we proposed a novel convolutional neural network which make sufficient use of low-level features together with high-level features and involves atrous convolution to get multi-scale features which should be considered as effective features. Our model is tested on three standard benchmarks - DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE databases. The results…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Automated segmentation of retinal blood vessels in label-free fundus images entails a pivotal role in computed aided diagnosis of ophthalmic pathologies, viz., diabetic retinopathy, hypertensive disorders and cardiovascular diseases. The challenge remains active in medical image analysis research due to varied distribution of blood vessels, which manifest variations in their dimensions of physical appearance against a noisy background. In this paper we formulate the segmentation challenge as a classification task. Specifically, we employ unsupervised hierarchical feature learning using ensembl…
VesselSim: learning 3D blood vessel segmentation without expert annotations
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada（计算机科学与软件工程系，康科迪亚大学，蒙特利尔，加拿大）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada（电气与计算机工程系，康科迪亚大学，蒙特利尔，加拿大）
Affinity Feature Strengthening for Accurate, Complete and Robust Vessel Segmentation
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Huawei Technologies Company Limited（华为技术有限公司）；Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学同济医学院附属协和医院）
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.
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 …
Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute（南澳大利亚健康与医学研究所）
Segmentation of cerebral blood vessels from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an open problem that could be solved with deep learning (DL). However, annotated data for training is often scarce. Due to the absence of open-source tools, we aim to develop a classical segmentation method that generates vessel ground truth from Magnetic Resonance Angiography for DL training of segmentation across a variety of modalities. The method combines size-specific Hessian filters, hysteresis thresholding and connected component correction. The optimal choice of processing steps was evaluated with a blinded…
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；Qingdao Municipal Hospital（青岛市市立医院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Liver cancer is one of the most common malignant diseases in the world. Segmentation and labeling of liver tumors and blood vessels in CT images can provide convenience for doctors in liver tumor diagnosis and surgical intervention. In the past decades, many state-of-the-art medical image segmentation algorithms appeared during this period. With the development of embedded devices, embedded deployment for medical segmentation and automatic reconstruction brings prospects for future automated surgical tasks. Yet, most of the existing segmentation methods mostly care about the spatial feature co…
Retinal Vessel Segmentation is important for the diagnosis of various diseases. The research on retinal vessel segmentation focuses mainly on the improvement of the segmentation model which is usually based on U-Net architecture. In our study, we use the U-Net architecture and we rely on heavy data augmentation in order to achieve better performance. The success of the data augmentation relies on successfully addressing the problem of input images. By analyzing input images and performing the augmentation accordingly we show that the performance of the U-Net model can be increased dramatically…
You can have your cake and eat it too. Microvessel segmentation in optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) images remains challenging. Skeleton-level segmentation shows clear topology but without diameter information, while pixel-level segmentation shows a clear caliber but low topology. To close this gap, we propose a novel label adversarial learning (LAL) for skeleton-level to pixel-level adjustable vessel segmentation. LAL mainly consists of two designs: a label adversarial loss and an embeddable adjustment layer. The label adversarial loss establishes an adversarial relationship be…
Pulmonary vessel segmentation is important for clinical diagnosis of pulmonary diseases, while is also challenging due to the complicated structure. In this work, we present an effective framework and refinement process of pulmonary vessel segmentation from chest computed tomographic (CT) images. The key to our approach is a 2.5D segmentation network applied from three orthogonal axes, which presents a robust and fully automated pulmonary vessel segmentation result with lower network complexity and memory usage compared to 3D networks. The slice radius is introduced to convolve the adjacent in…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；KU Leuven University（鲁汶大学）；University College London Hospital（伦敦大学学院医院）；University Hospital Leuven（鲁汶大学医院）
During fetoscopic laser photocoagulation, a treatment for twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), the clinician first identifies abnormal placental vascular connections and laser ablates them to regulate blood flow in both fetuses. The procedure is challenging due to the mobility of the environment, poor visibility in amniotic fluid, occasional bleeding, and limitations in the fetoscopic field-of-view and image quality. Ideally, anastomotic placental vessels would be automatically identified, segmented and registered to create expanded vessel maps to guide laser ablation, however, such metho…
In this study, a supervised retina blood vessel segmentation process was performed on the green channel of the RGB image using artificial neural network (ANN). The green channel is preferred because the retinal vessel structures can be distinguished most clearly from the green channel of the RGB image. The study was performed using 20 images in the DRIVE data set which is one of the most common retina data sets known. The images went through some preprocessing stages like contrastlimited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), color intensity adjustment, morphological operations and median an…
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…
Overview of Deep Learning Methods for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
The Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia（塞尔维亚人工智能研发研究所）；University of Novi Sad（诺维萨德大学）；The Faculty of Technical Sciences（技术科学学院）
Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一学院）；Maynooth University（梅努斯大学）；St. James’s Hospital（圣詹姆斯医院）
Accurate retinal vessel segmentation is an important task for many computer-aided diagnosis systems. Yet, it is still a challenging problem due to the complex vessel structures of an eye. Numerous vessel segmentation methods have been proposed recently, however more research is needed to deal with poor segmentation of thin and tiny vessels. To address this, we propose a new deep learning pipeline combining the efficiency of residual dense net blocks and, residual squeeze and excitation blocks. We validate experimentally our approach on three datasets and show that our pipeline outperforms curr…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
The morphological attributes of retinal vessels, such as length, width, tortuosity and branching pattern and angles, play an important role in diagnosis, screening, treatment, and evaluation of various cardiovascular and ophthalmologic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and arteriosclerosis. The crucial step before extracting these morphological characteristics of retinal vessels from retinal fundus images is vessel segmentation. In this work, we propose a method for retinal vessel segmentation based on fully convolutional networks. Thousands of patches are extracted from each retinal ima…
The morphology of retinal blood vessels can indicate various diseases in the human body, and researchers have been working on automatic scanning and segmentation of retinal images to aid diagnosis. This project compares the performance of four neural network architectures in segmenting retinal images, using a combined dataset from different databases, namely the UNet, DR-VNet, UNet-ResNet and UNet-VGG.
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Deepwise Healthcare（深睿医疗）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Vessel segmentation is widely used to help with vascular disease diagnosis. Vessels reconstructed using existing methods are often not sufficiently accurate to meet clinical use standards. This is because 3D vessel structures are highly complicated and exhibit unique characteristics, including sparsity and anisotropy. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid deep neural network for vessel segmentation. Our network consists of two cascaded subnetworks performing initial and refined segmentation respectively. The second subnetwork further has two tightly coupled components, a traditional CNN-bas…
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Siemens Healthcare GmbH（西门子医疗有限公司）
Computed Tomography Angiography is a key modality providing insights into the cerebrovascular vessel tree that are crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of ischemic strokes, in particular in cases of large vessel occlusions (LVO). Thus, the clinical workflow greatly benefits from an automated detection of patients suffering from LVOs. This work uses convolutional neural networks for case-level classification trained with elastic deformation of the vessel tree segmentation masks to artificially augment training data. Using only masks as the input to our model uniquely allows us to apply such …
The accurate retinal vessel segmentation (RVS) is of great significance to assist doctors in the diagnosis of ophthalmology diseases and other systemic diseases. Manually designing a valid neural network architecture for retinal vessel segmentation requires high expertise and a large workload. In order to improve the performance of vessel segmentation and reduce the workload of manually designing neural network, we propose novel approach which applies neural architecture search (NAS) to optimize an encoder-decoder architecture for retinal vessel segmentation. A modified evolutionary algorithm …
