The caliber and configuration of retinal blood vessels serve as important biomarkers for various diseases and medical conditions. A thorough analysis of the retinal vasculature requires the segmentation of the blood vessels and their classification into arteries and veins, typically performed on color fundus images obtained by retinography. However, manually performing these tasks is labor-intensive and prone to human error. While several automated methods have been proposed to address this task, the current state of art faces challenges due to manifest classification errors affecting the topological consistency of segmentation maps. In this work, we introduce RRWNet, a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that addresses this limitation. The framework consists of a fully convolutional neural network that recursively refines semantic segmentation maps, correcting manifest classification errors and thus improving topological consistency. In particular, RRWNet is composed of two specialized subnetworks: a Base subnetwork that generates base segmentation maps from the input images, and a Recursive Refinement subnetwork that iteratively and recursively improves these maps. Evaluation on three different public datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method, yielding more topologically consistent segmentation maps with fewer manifest classification errors than existing approaches. In addition, the Recursive Refinement module within RRWNet proves effective in post-processing segmentation maps from other methods, further demonstrating its potential. The model code, weights, and predictions will be publicly available at https://github.com/j-morano/rrwnet.
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…
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…
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…
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 Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Intuitive Surgical, Inc（直观外科公司）
Semantic image segmentation plays an important role in modeling patient-specific anatomy. We propose a convolution neural network, called Kid-Net, along with a training schema to segment kidney vessels: artery, vein and collecting system. Such segmentation is vital during the surgical planning phase in which medical decisions are made before surgical incision. Our main contribution is developing a training schema that handles unbalanced data, reduces false positives and enables high-resolution segmentation with a limited memory budget. These objectives are attained using dynamic weighting, ran…
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）
Peripancreatic vessel segmentation and anatomical labeling play extremely important roles to assist the early diagnosis, surgery planning and prognosis for patients with pancreatic tumors. However, most current techniques cannot achieve satisfactory segmentation performance for peripancreatic veins and usually make predictions with poor integrity and connectivity. Besides, unsupervised labeling algorithms cannot deal with complex anatomical variation while fully supervised methods require a large number of voxel-wise annotations for training, which is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. T…
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）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a novel imaging modality that has been widely utilized in ophthalmology and neuroscience studies to observe retinal vessels and microvascular systems. However, publicly available OCTA datasets remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce the largest and most comprehensive OCTA dataset dubbed OCTA-500, which contains OCTA imaging under two fields of view (FOVs) from 500 subjects. The dataset provides rich images and annotations including two modalities (OCT/OCTA volumes), six types of projections, four types of text labels (age / gender / eye / d…
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…
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 …
University of Bournemouth（伯恩茅斯大学）；IDIAP Research Institute（IDIAP研究所）；École de Technolgie Superieure de Montréal（蒙特利尔高等技术学院）；Diagnos Inc.（Diagnos公司）；CRCHUM University of Montreal Hospital Centre（蒙特利尔大学医院研究中心）
The segmentation of the retinal vasculature from eye fundus images represents one of the most fundamental tasks in retinal image analysis. Over recent years, increasingly complex approaches based on sophisticated Convolutional Neural Network architectures have been slowly pushing performance on well-established benchmark datasets. In this paper, we take a step back and analyze the real need of such complexity. Specifically, we demonstrate that a minimalistic version of a standard U-Net with several orders of magnitude less parameters, carefully trained and rigorously evaluated, closely approxi…
Topologically Faithful Multi-class Segmentation in Medical Images
School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学计算、信息与技术学院）；School of Medicine and Health, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学伊萨尔河畔 Klinikum 医学院与健康学院）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Munich Data Science Institute, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学慕尼黑数据科学研究所）；Department of Quantitative Biomedicine, University of Zurich（苏黎世大学定量生物医学系）
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…
Coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) provides detailed an-atomical information on all chambers of the heart. Existing segmentation tools can label the gross anatomy, but addition of application-specific labels can require detailed and often manual refinement. We developed a U-Net based framework to i) extrapolate a new label from existing labels, and ii) parcellate one label into multiple labels, both using label-to-label mapping, to create a desired segmentation that could then be learnt directly from the image (image- to-label mapping). This approach only required manual correctio…
