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）
Hana Sebia, Thomas Guyet, Mickaël Pereira, Marco Valdebenito, Hugues Berry, Benjamin Vidal
发表信息：
Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2025, 194, pp.110377
Segmentation of medical images is a fundamental task with numerous applications. While MRI, CT, and PET modalities have significantly benefited from deep learning segmentation techniques, more recent modalities, like functional ultrasound (fUS), have seen limited progress. fUS is a non invasive imaging method that measures changes in cerebral blood volume (CBV) with high spatio-temporal resolution. However, distinguishing arterioles from venules in fUS is challenging due to opposing blood flow directions within the same pixel. Ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM) can enhance resolution by tracking microbubble contrast agents but is invasive, and lacks dynamic CBV quantification. In this paper, we introduce the first deep learning-based segmentation tool for fUS images, capable of differentiating signals from different vascular compartments, based on ULM automatic annotation and enabling dynamic CBV quantification. We evaluate various UNet architectures on fUS images of rat brains, achieving competitive segmentation performance, with 90% accuracy, a 71% F1 score, and an IoU of 0.59, using only 100 temporal frames from a fUS stack. These results are comparable to those from tubular structure segmentation in other imaging modalities. Additionally, models trained on resting-state data generalize well to images captured during visual stimulation, highlighting robustness. This work offers a non-invasive, cost-effective alternative to ULM, enhancing fUS data interpretation and improving understanding of vessel function. Our pipeline shows high linear correlation coefficients between signals from predicted and actual compartments in both cortical and deeper regions, showcasing its ability to accurately capture blood flow dynamics.
Centerline Boundary Dice Loss for Vascular Segmentation
Electronic & Information Engineering School, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）电子与信息工程学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Aerospace Communication and Networking Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）广东省航天通信与网络技术重点实验室）；International Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）国际人工智能研究院）
The advancements in deep learning technologies have produced immense contributions to biomedical image analysis applications. With breast cancer being the common deadliest disease among women, early detection is the key means to improve survivability. Medical imaging like ultrasound presents an excellent visual representation of the functioning of the organs; however, for any radiologist analysing such scans is challenging and time consuming which delays the diagnosis process. Although various deep learning based approaches are proposed that achieved promising results, the present article intr…
CentraleSupélec（中央理工-高等电力学院）；INRIA Saclay（萨克莱 INRIA 研究所）；University Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；IRIT, CNRS UMR 5505（IRIT 研究所（法国国家科学研究中心 UMR 5505））；University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；ENSEEIHT（国立高等 Toulouse 理工学院）；TéSA（TéSA 研究所）
Joint deconvolution and segmentation of ultrasound images is a challenging problem in medical imaging. By adopting a hierarchical Bayesian model, we propose an accelerated Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme where the tissue reflectivity function is sampled thanks to a recently introduced proximal unadjusted Langevin algorithm. This new approach is combined with a forward-backward step and a preconditioning strategy to accelerate the convergence, and with a method based on the majorization-minimization principle to solve the inner nonconvex minimization problems. As demonstrated in numerical exper…
HDC: Hierarchical Distillation for Multi-level Noisy Consistency in Semi-Supervised Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation
University of Information Technology（信息科技大学）；Ho Chi Minh University of Technology（胡志明市技术大学）；University of Science（科学大学）；Vietnam National University（越南国家大学）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Taipei Medical University（台北医学大学）；Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology（邮电技术学院）；New Mexico State University（新墨西哥州立大学）
Medical imaging based prostate cancer diagnosis procedure uses intra-operative transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging to visualize the prostate shape and location to collect tissue samples. Correct tissue sampling from prostate requires accurate prostate segmentation in TRUS images. To achieve this, this study uses a novel residual connection based fully convolutional network. The advantage of this segmentation technique is that it requires no pre-processing of TRUS images to perform the segmentation. Thus, it offers a faster and straightforward prostate segmentation from TRUS images. Results s…
Anatomy-Guided Representation Learning Using a Transformer-Based Network for Thyroid Nodule Segmentation in Ultrasound Images
1 Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, 04762, South Korea；2 Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Seoul, 04762, South Korea；3 Department of Biomedical Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, South Korea ( )；4 Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative；Pain Medicine, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA ( )；5 Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, 04762, South Korea ( )；6 Department of Computer Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar ( )
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；TOMTEC Imaging Systems GmbH（TOMTEC成像系统有限公司）；Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学怀廷工程学院）
Segmentation of the left atrium and deriving its size can help to predict and detect various cardiovascular conditions. Automation of this process in 3D Ultrasound image data is desirable, since manual delineations are time-consuming, challenging and observer-dependent. Convolutional neural networks have made improvements in computer vision and in medical image analysis. They have successfully been applied to segmentation tasks and were extended to work on volumetric data. In this paper we introduce a combined deep-learning based approach on volumetric segmentation in Ultrasound acquisitions w…
Vesselpose: Vessel Graph Reconstruction from Learned Voxel-wise Direction Vectors in 3D Vascular Images
Max-Delbrueck-Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association（马克斯·德尔布鲁克医学研究中心（马克斯·德尔布鲁克医学研究中心））；Humboldt University of Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Helmholtz Imaging（海德堡成像）；German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK)（德国心脏病研究中心（DZHK））；Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC)（实验与临床研究中心（ECRC））
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Guangxi University for Nationalities（广西民族大学）；Shenzhen Delica Medical Equipement Company Limited（深圳德力凯医疗设备有限公司）；Hospital of Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学医院）
Ultrasound imaging plays an important role in the diagnosis of vascular lesions. Accurate segmentation of the vascular wall is important for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of vascular diseases. However, existing methods have inaccurate localization of the vascular wall boundary. Segmentation errors occur in discontinuous vascular wall boundaries and dark boundaries. To overcome these problems, we propose a new boundary-delineation network (BDNet). We use the boundary refinement module to re-delineate the boundary of the vascular wall to obtain the correct boundary location. We designe…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学学术医学中心）；The University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Ultrasound localization microscopy has enabled super-resolution vascular imaging through precise localization of individual ultrasound contrast agents (microbubbles) across numerous imaging frames. However, analysis of high-density regions with significant overlaps among the microbubble point spread responses yields high localization errors, constraining the technique to low-concentration conditions. As such, long acquisition times are required to sufficiently cover the vascular bed. In this work, we present a fast and precise method for obtaining super-resolution vascular images from high-den…
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…
University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center（R·亚当斯·考利休克创伤中心）；University of Maryland, Baltimore（马里兰大学巴尔的摩分校）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
The spleen is one of the most commonly injured solid organs in blunt abdominal trauma. The development of automatic segmentation systems from multi-phase CT for splenic vascular injury can augment severity grading for improving clinical decision support and outcome prediction. However, accurate segmentation of splenic vascular injury is challenging for the following reasons: 1) Splenic vascular injury can be highly variant in shape, texture, size, and overall appearance; and 2) Data acquisition is a complex and expensive procedure that requires intensive efforts from both data scientists and r…
Ultrasound contrast enhanced imaging has seen widespread uptake in research and clinical diagnostic imaging. This includes applications such as vector flow imaging, functional ultrasound and super-resolution Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM). All of these require testing and validation during development of new algorithms with ground truth data. In this work we present a comprehensive simulation platform BUbble Flow Field (BUFF) that generates contrast enhanced ultrasound images in vascular tree geometries with realistic flow characteristics and validation algorithms for ULM. BUFF allow…
Color images are easy to understand visually and can acquire a great deal of information, such as color and texture. They are highly and widely used in tasks such as segmentation. On the other hand, in indoor person segmentation, it is necessary to collect person data considering privacy. We propose a new task for human segmentation from invisible information, especially airborne ultrasound. We first convert ultrasound waves to reflected ultrasound directional images (ultrasound images) to perform segmentation from invisible information. Although ultrasound images can roughly identify a person…
Large enough computed tomography (CT) data sets to train supervised deep models are often hard to come by. One contributing issue is the amount of manual labor that goes into creating ground truth labels, specially for volumetric data. In this research, we train a U-net architecture at a vessel segmentation task that can be used to provide insights when treating stroke patients. We create a computational model that generates synthetic vascular structures which can be blended into unlabeled CT scans of the head. This unsupervised approached to labelling is used to pre-train deep segmentation mo…
PASC-Net:Plug-and-play Shape Self-learning Convolutions Network with Hierarchical Topology Constraints for Vessel Segmentation
School of Information Science and Technology, Northwest University（信息科学与技术学院，西北大学）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford（生物医学工程研究所，工程科学系，牛津大学）
Image Sciences Institute, UMC Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心影像科学研究所）；Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, UMC Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心尤利乌斯健康科学与初级保健中心）；Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, UMC Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心神经内科与神经外科）
Lacunes of presumed vascular origin are fluid-filled cavities of between 3 - 15 mm in diameter, visible on T1 and FLAIR brain MRI. Quantification of lacunes relies on manual annotation or semi-automatic / interactive approaches; and almost no automatic methods exist for this task. In this work, we present a two-stage approach to segment lacunes of presumed vascular origin: (1) detection with Mask R-CNN followed by (2) segmentation with a U-Net CNN. Data originates from Task 3 of the "Where is VALDO?" challenge and consists of 40 training subjects. We report the mean DICE on the training set of…
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）
VARPA Research Group, Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC), Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学生物医学研究所（INIBIC）VARPA研究组）；Centro de Investigación CITIC, Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学CITIC研究中心）
In ophthalmology, the study of the retinal microcirculation is a key issue in the analysis of many ocular and systemic diseases, like hypertension or diabetes. This motivates the research on improving the retinal vasculature segmentation. Nowadays, Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs) usually represent the most successful approach to image segmentation. However, the success of these models is conditioned by an adequate selection and adaptation of the architectures and techniques used, as well as the availability of a large amount of annotated data. These two issues become specially relev…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Nanfang Medical University（南方医科大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Volumetric ultrasound has great potentials in promoting prenatal examinations. Automated solutions are highly desired to efficiently and effectively analyze the massive volumes. Segmentation and landmark localization are two key techniques in making the quantitative evaluation of prenatal ultrasound volumes available in clinic. However, both tasks are non-trivial when considering the poor image quality, boundary ambiguity and anatomical variations in volumetric ultrasound. In this paper, we propose an effective framework for simultaneous segmentation and landmark localization in prenatal ultra…
Dr-SAM: An End-to-End Framework for Vascular Segmentation, Diameter Estimation, and Anomaly Detection on Angiography Images
Yerevan State University (YSU)（埃里温国立大学）；Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB)（波鸿鲁尔大学）；Synopsys Armenia CJSC（新思亚美尼亚公司）；ServiceTitan, Inc.（ServiceTitan公司）；Picsart AI Research (PAIR)（Picsart人工智能研究院）；Johannes Wesling University Hospital（约翰内斯·韦斯林大学医院）
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…
University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；University of Guilan（吉兰大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科学技术大学）
Automated 3-D breast ultrasound (ABUS) is a newfound system for breast screening that has been proposed as a supplementary modality to mammography for breast cancer detection. While ABUS has better performance in dense breasts, reading ABUS images is exhausting and time-consuming. So, a computer-aided detection system is necessary for interpretation of these images. Mass segmentation plays a vital role in the computer-aided detection systems and it affects the overall performance. Mass segmentation is a challenging task because of the large variety in size, shape, and texture of masses. Moreov…
Philips Research North America（飞利浦北美研究院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
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 join…
Ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia (UGRA) can replace general anesthesia (GA), improving pain control and recovery time. This method can be applied on the brachial plexus (BP) after clavicular surgeries. However, identification of the BP from ultrasound (US) images is difficult, even for trained professionals. To address this problem, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and more advanced deep neural networks (DNNs) can be used for identification and segmentation of the BP nerve region. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model consisting of a classification model followed by a segmentation …
CP-UNet: Contour-based Probabilistic Model for Medical Ultrasound Images Segmentation
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application（天津认知计算与应用重点实验室）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking（天津先进网络重点实验室）；School of Future Technology, Tianjin University（天津大学未来技术学院）
Segmentation of ultrasound images is an essential task in both diagnosis and image-guided interventions given the ease-of-use and low cost of this imaging modality. As manual segmentation is tedious and time consuming, a growing body of research has focused on the development of automatic segmentation algorithms. Deep learning algorithms have shown remarkable achievements in this regard; however, they need large training datasets. Unfortunately, preparing large labeled datasets in ultrasound images is prohibitively difficult. Therefore, in this study, we propose the use of simulated ultrasound…
Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Memorial University（纪念大学工程与应用科学学院）；Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University（纪念大学医学院）
Detection of relative changes in circulating blood volume is important to guide resuscitation and manage a 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 the cross-sectional area (CSA) of the internal jugular vein (IJV) from ultrasound images. However, accurate segmentation and tracking of the IJV in ultrasound imaging is a challenging task and is significantly influenced by a number of parameters such as the image quality, shape, and temporal variation. In …
Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is a condition in infants where the femoral head is incorrectly located in the hip joint. We propose a deep learning algorithm for segmenting key structures within ultrasound images, employing this to calculate Femoral Head Coverage (FHC) and provide a screening diagnosis for DDH. To our knowledge, this is the first study to automate FHC calculation for DDH screening. Our algorithm outperforms the international state of the art, agreeing with expert clinicians on 89.8% of our test images.
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Automatically segmenting lesion area in breast ultrasound (BUS) images is a challenging one due to its noise, speckle and artifacts. Edge-map of BUS images also does not help because in most cases the edge-map gives no information whatsoever. Almost all segmentation technique takes the edge-map of the image as its first step, though there are a few algorithms that try to avoid edge-maps as well. Improving the edge-map of breast ultrasound images theoretically improves the chances of automatic segmentation to be more precise. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic technique of histogram spl…
Applying machine learning technologies, especially deep learning, into medical image segmentation is being widely studied because of its state-of-the-art performance and results. It can be a key step to provide a reliable basis for clinical diagnosis, such as 3D reconstruction of human tissues, image-guided interventions, image analyzing and visualization. In this review article, deep-learning-based methods for ultrasound image segmentation are categorized into six main groups according to their architectures and training at first. Secondly, for each group, several current representative algor…
Deep convolutional neural networks have proved effective in segmenting lesions and anatomies in various medical imaging modalities. However, in the presence of small sample size and domain shift problems, these models often produce masks with non-intuitive segmentation mistakes. In this paper, we propose a segmentation framework called ErrorNet, which learns to correct these segmentation mistakes through the repeated process of injecting systematic segmentation errors to the segmentation result based on a learned shape prior, followed by attempting to predict the injected error. During inferen…
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息科学研究生院）；Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息学院研究生院）；School of Information Science, Aichi Institute of Technology（爱知工业大学信息学院）；Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine（名古屋大学医学研究生院）
This paper presents a new approach for precisely estimating the renal vascular dominant region using a Voronoi diagram. To provide computer-assisted diagnostics for the pre-surgical simulation of partial nephrectomy surgery, we must obtain information on the renal arteries and the renal vascular dominant regions. We propose a fully automatic segmentation method that combines a neural network and tensor-based graph-cut methods to precisely extract the kidney and renal arteries. First, we use a convolutional neural network to localize the kidney regions and extract tiny renal arteries with a ten…
Romanian Institute of Science and Technology（罗马尼亚科学技术研究所）；University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova（克拉约瓦医药大学）
The present paper puts forward an incipient study that uses a traditional segmentation method based on Zernike moments for extracting significant features from frames of fetal echocardiograms from first trimester color Doppler examinations. A distance based approach is then used on the obtained indicators to classify frames of three given categories that should be present in a normal heart condition. The computational tool shows promise in supporting the obstetrician in a rapid recognition of heart views during screening.
