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Sobotka D, Herold A, Perkonigg M, Beer L, Bastati N, Sablatnig A, Ba-Ssalamah A, Langs G. Improving Vessel Segmentation with Multi-Task Learning and Auxiliary Data Available Only During Model Training. Comput Med Imaging Graph 2024; 114:102369. [PMID: 38518411 DOI: 10.1016/j.compmedimag.2024.102369] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/31/2023] [Revised: 03/13/2024] [Accepted: 03/13/2024] [Indexed: 03/24/2024]
Abstract
Liver vessel segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging data is important for the computational analysis of vascular remodeling, associated with a wide spectrum of diffuse liver diseases. Existing approaches rely on contrast enhanced imaging data, but the necessary dedicated imaging sequences are not uniformly acquired. Images without contrast enhancement are acquired more frequently, but vessel segmentation is challenging, and requires large-scale annotated data. We propose a multi-task learning framework to segment vessels in liver MRI without contrast. It exploits auxiliary contrast enhanced MRI data available only during training to reduce the need for annotated training examples. Our approach draws on paired native and contrast enhanced data with and without vessel annotations for model training. Results show that auxiliary data improves the accuracy of vessel segmentation, even if they are not available during inference. The advantage is most pronounced if only few annotations are available for training, since the feature representation benefits from the shared task structure. A validation of this approach to augment a model for brain tumor segmentation confirms its benefits across different domains. An auxiliary informative imaging modality can augment expert annotations even if it is only available during training.
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Affiliation(s)
- Daniel Sobotka
- Computational Imaging Research Lab, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Alexander Herold
- Division of General and Paediatric Radiology, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Matthias Perkonigg
- Computational Imaging Research Lab, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; Department of Medical Statistics, Informatics and Health Economics, Medical University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Lucian Beer
- Division of General and Paediatric Radiology, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Nina Bastati
- Division of General and Paediatric Radiology, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Alina Sablatnig
- Computational Imaging Research Lab, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Ahmed Ba-Ssalamah
- Division of General and Paediatric Radiology, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Georg Langs
- Computational Imaging Research Lab, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
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Wu R, Xin Y, Qian J, Dong Y. A multi-scale interactive U-Net for pulmonary vessel segmentation method based on transfer learning. Biomed Signal Process Control 2023. [DOI: 10.1016/j.bspc.2022.104407] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
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3
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Zbinden L, Catucci D, Suter Y, Berzigotti A, Ebner L, Christe A, Obmann VC, Sznitman R, Huber AT. Convolutional neural network for automated segmentation of the liver and its vessels on non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon acquisitions. Sci Rep 2022; 12:22059. [PMID: 36543852 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-26328-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/30/2022] [Accepted: 12/13/2022] [Indexed: 12/24/2022] Open
Abstract
We evaluated the effectiveness of automated segmentation of the liver and its vessels with a convolutional neural network on non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon acquisitions. A dataset of non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon liver magnetic resonance images was labelled slice-by-slice for the outer liver border, portal, and hepatic veins by an expert. A 3D U-Net convolutional neural network was trained with different combinations of Dixon in-phase, opposed-phase, water, and fat reconstructions. The neural network trained with the single-modal in-phase reconstructions achieved a high performance for liver parenchyma (Dice 0.936 ± 0.02), portal veins (0.634 ± 0.09), and hepatic veins (0.532 ± 0.12) segmentation. No benefit of using multi-modal input was observed (p = 1.0 for all experiments), combining in-phase, opposed-phase, fat, and water reconstruction. Accuracy for differentiation between portal and hepatic veins was 99% for portal veins and 97% for hepatic veins in the central region and slightly lower in the peripheral region (91% for portal veins, 80% for hepatic veins). In conclusion, deep learning-based automated segmentation of the liver and its vessels on non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon was highly effective. The single-modal in-phase input achieved the best performance in segmentation and differentiation between portal and hepatic veins.
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Li H, Tang Z, Nan Y, Yang G. Human treelike tubular structure segmentation: A comprehensive review and future perspectives. Comput Biol Med 2022; 151:106241. [PMID: 36379190 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.106241] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/12/2022] [Revised: 09/16/2022] [Accepted: 10/22/2022] [Indexed: 12/27/2022]
Abstract
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 provides insights into disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognosis. Manually labelling extensive data by radiologists is often time-consuming and error-prone. As a result, automated or semi-automated computational models have become a popular research field of medical imaging in the past two decades, and many have been developed to date. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of currently publicly available datasets, segmentation algorithms, and evaluation metrics. In addition, current challenges and future research directions are discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hao Li
- National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Zeyu Tang
- National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Yang Nan
- National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Guang Yang
- National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Royal Brompton Hospital, London, United Kingdom.
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Xu H, Lafage-Proust MH, Bouazza L, Geraci S, Clezardin P, Roche B, Peyrin F, Langer M. Impact of Anti-Angiogenic Treatment on Bone Vascularization in a Murine Model of Breast Cancer Bone Metastasis Using Synchrotron Radiation Micro-CT. Cancers (Basel) 2022; 14. [PMID: 35884504 DOI: 10.3390/cancers14143443] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/13/2022] [Revised: 07/06/2022] [Accepted: 07/12/2022] [Indexed: 12/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Bone metastases are frequent complications of breast cancer, facilitating the development of anarchic vascularization and induce bone destruction. Therefore, anti-angiogenic drugs (AAD) have been tested as a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of breast cancer bone metastasis. However, the kinetics of skeletal vascularization in response to tumor invasion under AAD is still partially understood. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the effect of AAD on experimental bone metastasis by analyzing the three-dimensional (3D) bone vasculature during metastatic formation and progression. Seventy-three eight-week-old female mice were treated with AAD (bevacizumab, vatalanib, or a combination of both drugs) or the vehicle (placebo) one day after injection with breast cancer cells. Mice were sacrificed eight or 22 days after tumor cell inoculation (time points T1 and T2, respectively). Synchrotron radiation microcomputed tomography (SR-μCT) was used to image bone and blood vessels with a contrast agent. Hence, 3D-bone and vascular networks were simultaneously visualized and quantitatively analyzed. At T1, the trabecular bone volume fraction was significantly increased (p < 0.05) in the combined AAD-treatment group, compared to the placebo- and single AAD-treatment groups. At T2, only the bone vasculature was reduced in the combined AAD-treatment group (p < 0.05), as judged by measurement of the blood vessel thickness. Our data suggest that, at the early stage, combined AAD treatment dampens tumor-induced bone resorption with no detectable effects on bone vessel organization while, at a later stage, it affects the structure of bone microvascularization.
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Altini N, Prencipe B, Cascarano GD, Brunetti A, Brunetti G, Triggiani V, Carnimeo L, Marino F, Guerriero A, Villani L, Scardapane A, Bevilacqua V. Liver, kidney and spleen segmentation from CT scans and MRI with deep learning: A survey. Neurocomputing 2022. [DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2021.08.157] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/18/2022]
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Zhang J, Wu F, Chang W, Kong D. Techniques and Algorithms for Hepatic Vessel Skeletonization in Medical Images: A Survey. Entropy 2022; 24:465. [PMID: 35455128 PMCID: PMC9031516 DOI: 10.3390/e24040465] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/28/2022] [Revised: 03/21/2022] [Accepted: 03/23/2022] [Indexed: 02/01/2023]
Abstract
Hepatic vessel skeletonization serves as an important means of hepatic vascular analysis and vessel segmentation. This paper presents a survey of techniques and algorithms for hepatic vessel skeletonization in medical images. We summarized the latest developments and classical approaches in this field. These methods are classified into five categories according to their methodological characteristics. The overview and brief assessment of each category are provided in the corresponding chapters, respectively. We provide a comprehensive summary among the cited publications, image modalities and datasets from various aspects, which hope to reveal the pros and cons of every method, summarize its achievements and discuss the challenges and future trends.
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Guo Q, Song H, Fan J, Ai D, Gao Y, Yu X, Yang J. Portal Vein and Hepatic Vein Segmentation in Multi-Phase MR Images Using Flow-Guided Change Detection. IEEE Trans Image Process 2022; 31:2503-2517. [PMID: 35275817 DOI: 10.1109/tip.2022.3157136] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/14/2023]
Abstract
Segmenting portal vein (PV) and hepatic vein (HV) from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans is important for hepatic tumor surgery. Compared with single phase-based methods, multiple phases-based methods have better scalability in distinguishing HV and PV by exploiting multi-phase information. However, these methods just coarsely extract HV and PV from different phase images. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to automatically and robustly segment 3D HV and PV from multi-phase MR images, which considers both the change and appearance caused by the vascular flow event to improve segmentation performance. Firstly, inspired by change detection, flow-guided change detection (FGCD) is designed to detect the changed voxels related to hepatic venous flow by generating hepatic venous phase map and clustering the map. The FGCD uniformly deals with HV and PV clustering by the proposed shared clustering, thus making the appearance correlated with portal venous flow robustly delineate without increasing framework complexity. Then, to refine vascular segmentation results produced by both HV and PV clustering, interclass decision making (IDM) is proposed by combining the overlapping region discrimination and neighborhood direction consistency. Finally, our framework is evaluated on multi-phase clinical MR images of the public dataset (TCGA) and local hospital dataset. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our framework outperforms the existing methods.
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Abstract
Deep learning has enabled significant improvements in the accuracy of 3D blood vessel segmentation. Open challenges remain in scenarios where labeled 3D segmentation maps for training are severely limited, as is often the case in practice, and in ensuring robustness to noise. Inspired by the observation that 3D vessel structures project onto 2D image slices with informative and unique edge profiles, we propose a novel deep 3D vessel segmentation network guided by edge profiles. Our network architecture comprises a shared encoder and two decoders that learn segmentation maps and edge profiles jointly. 3D context is mined in both the segmentation and edge prediction branches by employing bidirectional convolutional long-short term memory (BCLSTM) modules. 3D features from the two branches are concatenated to facilitate learning of the segmentation map. As a key contribution, we introduce new regularization terms that: a) capture the local homogeneity of 3D blood vessel volumes in the presence of biomarkers; and b) ensure performance robustness to domain-specific noise by suppressing false positive responses. Experiments on benchmark datasets with ground truth labels reveal that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on standard measures such as DICE overlap and mean Intersection-over-Union. The performance gains of our method are even more pronounced when training is limited. Furthermore, the computational cost of our network inference is among the lowest compared with state-of-the-art.
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Affane A, Lamy J, Lebre M, Vacavant A. Robust deep 3-D architectures based on vascular patterns for liver vessel segmentation. Informatics in Medicine Unlocked 2022; 34:101111. [DOI: 10.1016/j.imu.2022.101111] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/06/2022] Open
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Guo B, Zhou F, Liu B, Bai X. Voxel-Wise Adversarial FiboNet for 3D Cerebrovascular Segmentation on Magnetic Resonance Angiography Images. Front Neurosci 2021; 15:756536. [PMID: 34899162 PMCID: PMC8660083 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2021.756536] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/10/2021] [Accepted: 10/13/2021] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Cerebrovascular segmentation is important in various clinical applications, such as surgical planning and computer-aided diagnosis. In order to achieve high segmentation performance, three challenging problems should be taken into consideration: (1) large variations in vascular anatomies and voxel intensities; (2) severe class imbalance between foreground and background voxels; (3) image noise with different magnitudes. Limited accuracy was achieved without considering these challenges in deep learning-based methods for cerebrovascular segmentation. To overcome the limitations, we propose an end-to-end adversarial model called FiboNet-VANGAN. Specifically, our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) to relieve the first problem mentioned above, a discriminator is proposed to regularize for voxel-wise distribution consistency between the segmentation results and the ground truth; (2) to mitigate the problem of class imbalance, we propose to use the addition of cross-entropy and Dice coefficient as the loss function of the generator. Focal loss is utilized as the loss function of the discriminator; (3) a new feature connection is proposed, based on which a generator called FiboNet is built. By incorporating Dice coefficient in the training of FiboNet, noise robustness can be improved by a large margin. We evaluate our method on a healthy magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) dataset to validate its effectiveness. A brain atrophy MRA dataset is also collected to test the performance of each method on abnormal cases. Results show that the three problems in cerebrovascular segmentation mentioned above can be alleviated and high segmentation accuracy can be achieved on both datasets using our method.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bin Guo
- Image Processing Center, School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing, China
| | - Fugen Zhou
- Image Processing Center, School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing, China
| | - Bo Liu
- Image Processing Center, School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing, China
| | - Xiangzhi Bai
- Image Processing Center, School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing, China
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Zhao C, Basu A. Pixel Distribution Learning for Vessel Segmentation under Multiple Scales. Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc 2021; 2021:2717-2721. [PMID: 34891812 DOI: 10.1109/embc46164.2021.9629614] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/14/2023]
Abstract
In this work we try to address if there is a better way to classify two distributions, rather than using histograms; and answer if we can make a deep learning network learn and classify distributions automatically. These improvements can have wide ranging applications in computer vision and medical image processing. More specifically, we propose a new vessel segmentation method based on pixel distribution learning under multiple scales. In particular, a spatial distribution descriptor named Random Permutation of Spatial Pixels (RPoSP) is derived from vessel images and used as the input to a convolutional neural network for distribution learning. Based on our preliminary experiments we currently believe that a wide network, rather than a deep one, is better for distribution learning. There is only one convolutional layer, one rectified linear layer and one fully connected layer followed by a softmax loss in our network. Furthermore, in order to improve the accuracy of the proposed approach, the RPoSP features are captured at multiple scales and combined together to form the input of the network. Evaluations using standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves promising results compared to the state-of-the-art.
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13
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Tang X, Huang B, Cai Q, Wei Z, Gao Y, Wang Y, Tong H, Liang P, Zhong C. Celiac trunk segmentation incorporating with additional contour constraint. APPL INTELL 2021; 51:7196-7207. [DOI: 10.1007/s10489-021-02221-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/22/2022]
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Gao T, Lu Z, Wang F, Zhao H, Wang J, Pan S. Using the Compressed Sensing Technique for Lumbar Vertebrae Imaging: Comparison with Conventional Parallel Imaging. Curr Med Imaging 2021; 17:1010-1017. [PMID: 33573574 PMCID: PMC8653421 DOI: 10.2174/1573405617666210126155814] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/10/2020] [Revised: 12/17/2020] [Accepted: 12/22/2020] [Indexed: 11/22/2022]
Abstract
OBJECTIVE To compare conventional sensitivity encoding turbo spin-echo (SENSE-TSE) with compressed sensing plus SENSE turbo spin-echo (CS-TSE) in lumbar vertebrae magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). METHODS This retrospective study of lumbar vertebrae MRI included 600 patients; 300 patients received SENSE-TSE and 300 patients received CS-TSE. The SENSE acceleration factor was 1.4 for T1WI, 1.7 for T2WI, and 1.7 for PDWI. The CS total acceleration factor was 2.4, 3.6, 4.0, and 4.0 for T1WI, T2WI, PDWI sagittal, and T2WI transverse, respectively. The image quality of each MRI sequence was evaluated objectively by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and subjectively on a five-point scale. Two radiologists independently reviewed the MRI sequences of the 300 patients receiving CS-TSE, and their diagnostic consistency was evaluated. The degree of intervertebral foraminal stenosis and nerve root compression was assessed using the T1WI sagittal and T2WI transverse images. RESULTS The scan time was reduced from 7 min 28 s to 4 min 26 s with CS-TSE. The median score of nerve root image quality was 5 (p > 0.05). The diagnostic consistency using CS-TSE images between the two radiologists was high for diagnosing lumbar diseases (κ > 0.75) and for evaluating the degree of lumbar foraminal stenosis and nerve root compression (κ = 0.882). No differences between SENSE-TSE and CS-TSE were observed for sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, or negative predictive value. CONCLUSION CS-TSE has the potential for diagnosing lumbar vertebrae and disc disorders.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tianyang Gao
- Department of Radiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China
| | - Zhao Lu
- Department of Radiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China
| | - Fengzhe Wang
- Department of Radiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China
| | - Heng Zhao
- Department of Radiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China
| | - Jiazheng Wang
- Department of Clinical Science, Philips Healthcare, Beijing 100600, China
| | - Shinong Pan
- Department of Radiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China
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Mardani K, Maghooli K. Enhancing retinal blood vessel segmentation in medical images using combined segmentation modes extracted by DBSCAN and morphological reconstruction. Biomed Signal Process Control 2021. [DOI: 10.1016/j.bspc.2021.102837] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/12/2022]
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Zhang H, Zhang W, Shen W, Li N, Chen Y, Li S, Chen B, Guo S, Wang Y. Automatic segmentation of the cardiac MR images based on nested fully convolutional dense network with dilated convolution. Biomed Signal Process Control 2021; 68:102684. [DOI: 10.1016/j.bspc.2021.102684] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/13/2022]
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17
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Affane A, Kucharski A, Chapuis P, Freydier S, Lebre M, Vacavant A, Fabijańska A. Segmentation of Liver Anatomy by Combining 3D U-Net Approaches. Applied Sciences 2021; 11:4895. [DOI: 10.3390/app11114895] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/13/2022]
Abstract
Accurate liver vessel segmentation is of crucial importance for the clinical diagnosis and treatment of many hepatic diseases. Recent state-of-the-art methods for liver vessel reconstruction mostly utilize deep learning methods, namely, the U-Net model and its variants. However, to the best of our knowledge, no comparative evaluation has been proposed to compare these approaches in the liver vessel segmentation task. Moreover, most research works do not consider the liver volume segmentation as a preprocessing step, in order to keep only inner hepatic vessels, for Couinaud representation for instance. For these reasons, in this work, we propose using accurate Dense U-Net liver segmentation and conducting a comparison between 3D U-Net models inside the obtained volumes. More precisely, 3D U-Net, Dense U-Net, and MultiRes U-Net are pitted against each other in the vessel segmentation task on the IRCAD dataset. For each model, three alternative setups that allow adapting the selected CNN architectures to volumetric data are tested, namely, full 3D, slab-based, and box-based setups are considered. The results showed that the most accurate setup is the full 3D process, providing the highest Dice for most of the considered models. However, concerning the particular models, the slab-based MultiRes U-Net provided the best score. With our accurate vessel segmentations, several medical applications can be investigated, such as automatic and personalized Couinaud zoning of the liver.
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Ciecholewski M, Kassjański M. Computational Methods for Liver Vessel Segmentation in Medical Imaging: A Review. Sensors (Basel) 2021; 21:s21062027. [PMID: 33809361 PMCID: PMC7999381 DOI: 10.3390/s21062027] [Citation(s) in RCA: 19] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/11/2021] [Revised: 03/07/2021] [Accepted: 03/09/2021] [Indexed: 12/12/2022]
Abstract
The segmentation of liver blood vessels is of major importance as it is essential for formulating diagnoses, planning and delivering treatments, as well as evaluating the results of clinical procedures. Different imaging techniques are available for application in clinical practice, so the segmentation methods should take into account the characteristics of the imaging technique. Based on the literature, this review paper presents the most advanced and effective methods of liver vessel segmentation, as well as their performance according to the metrics used. This paper includes results available for four imaging methods, namely: computed tomography (CT), computed tomography angiography (CTA), magnetic resonance (MR), and ultrasonography (USG). The publicly available datasets used in research are also presented. This paper may help researchers gain better insight into the available materials and methods, making it easier to develop new, more effective solutions, as well as to improve existing approaches. This article analyzes in detail various segmentation methods, which can be divided into three groups: active contours, tracking-based, and machine learning techniques. For each group of methods, their theoretical and practical characteristics are discussed, and the pros and cons are highlighted. The most advanced and promising approaches are also suggested. However, we conclude that liver vasculature segmentation is still an open problem, because of the various deficiencies and constraints researchers need to address and try to eliminate from the solutions used.
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Jia D, Zhuang X. Learning-based algorithms for vessel tracking: A review. Comput Med Imaging Graph 2021; 89:101840. [PMID: 33548822 DOI: 10.1016/j.compmedimag.2020.101840] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/29/2020] [Revised: 10/07/2020] [Accepted: 12/03/2020] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
Abstract
Developing efficient vessel-tracking algorithms is crucial for imaging-based diagnosis and treatment of vascular diseases. Vessel tracking aims to solve recognition problems such as key (seed) point detection, centerline extraction, and vascular segmentation. Extensive image-processing techniques have been developed to overcome the problems of vessel tracking that are mainly attributed to the complex morphologies of vessels and image characteristics of angiography. This paper presents a literature review on vessel-tracking methods, focusing on machine-learning-based methods. First, the conventional machine-learning-based algorithms are reviewed, and then, a general survey of deep-learning-based frameworks is provided. On the basis of the reviewed methods, the evaluation issues are introduced. The paper is concluded with discussions about the remaining exigencies and future research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dengqiang Jia
- School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
| | - Xiahai Zhuang
- School of Data Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
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Ni J, Wu J, Tong J, Chen Z, Zhao J. GC-Net: Global context network for medical image segmentation. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 2020; 190:105121. [PMID: 31623863 DOI: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2019.105121] [Citation(s) in RCA: 26] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/24/2019] [Revised: 09/23/2019] [Accepted: 10/04/2019] [Indexed: 06/10/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Medical image segmentation plays an important role in many clinical applications such as disease diagnosis, surgery planning, and computer-assisted therapy. However, it is a very challenging task due to variant images qualities, complex shapes of objects, and the existence of outliers. Recently, researchers have presented deep learning methods to segment medical images. However, these methods often use the high-level features of the convolutional neural network directly or the high-level features combined with the shallow features, thus ignoring the role of the global context features for the segmentation task. Consequently, they have limited capability on extensive medical segmentation tasks. The purpose of this work is to devise a neural network with global context feature information for accomplishing medical image segmentation of different tasks. METHODS The proposed global context network (GC-Net) consists of two components; feature encoding and decoding modules. We use multiple convolutions and batch normalization layers in the encoding module. On the other hand, the decoding module is formed by a proposed global context attention (GCA) block and squeeze and excitation pyramid pooling (SEPP) block. The GCA module connects low-level and high-level features to produce more representative features, while the SEPP module increases the size of the receptive field and the ability of multi-scale feature fusion. Moreover, a weighted cross entropy loss is designed to better balance the segmented and non-segmented regions. RESULTS The proposed GC-Net is validated on three publicly available datasets and one local dataset. The tested medical segmentation tasks include segmentation of intracranial blood vessel, retinal vessels, cell contours, and lung. Experiments demonstrate that, our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods concerning several commonly used evaluation metrics. CONCLUSION Medical segmentation of different tasks can be accurately and effectively achieved by devising a deep convolutional neural network with a global context attention mechanism.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jiajia Ni
- Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; College of Internet of Things Engineering, HoHai University Changzhou, China
| | - Jianhuang Wu
- Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
| | - Jing Tong
- College of Internet of Things Engineering, HoHai University Changzhou, China
| | - Zhengming Chen
- College of Internet of Things Engineering, HoHai University Changzhou, China
| | - Junping Zhao
- Institute of Medical Informatics, Chinese PLA General Hospital, China
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Singh P. A neutrosophic-entropy based clustering algorithm (NEBCA) with HSV color system: A special application in segmentation of Parkinson's disease (PD) MR images. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 2020; 189:105317. [PMID: 31981758 DOI: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105317] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/17/2019] [Revised: 01/03/2020] [Accepted: 01/04/2020] [Indexed: 06/10/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Brain MR images consist of three major regions: gray matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. Medical experts make decisions on different serious diseases by evaluating the developments in these areas. One of the significant approaches used in analyzing the MR images were segmenting the regions. However, their segmentation suffers from two major problems as: (a) the boundaries of their gray matter and white matter regions are ambiguous in nature, and (b) their regions are formed with unclear inhomogeneous gray structures. For these reasons, diagnosis of critical diseases is often very difficult. METHODS This study presented a new method for MR image segmentation, which consisted of two main parts as: (a) neutrosophic-entropy based clustering algorithm (NEBCA), and (b) HSV color system. The NEBCA's role in this study was to perform segmentation of MR regions, while HSV color system was used to provide better visual representation of features in segmented regions. RESULTS Application of the proposed method was demonstrated in 30 different MR images of Parkinson's disease (PD). Experimental results were presented individually for the NEBCA and HSV color system. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated in terms of statistical metrics used in an image segmentation domain. Experimental results, including statistical analysis reflected the efficiency of the proposed method over the existing well-known image segmentation methods available in literature. For the proposed method and existing methods, the average CPU time (in nanosecond) was computed and it was found that the proposed method consumed less time to segment MR images. CONCLUSION The proposed method can effectively segment different regions of MR images and can very clearly represent those segmented regions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Pritpal Singh
- Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 10608, Taiwan; Smt. Chandaben Mohanbhai Patel Institute of Computer Applications, CHARUSAT Campus, Changa, Anand 388421, Gujarat, India.
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Ibragimov B, Toesca DA, Chang DT, Yuan Y, Koong AC, Xing L. Automated hepatobiliary toxicity prediction after liver stereotactic body radiation therapy with deep learning-based portal vein segmentation. Neurocomputing 2020. [DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2018.11.112] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/26/2022]
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Abstract
The segmentation of blood vessels from retinal images is an important and challenging task in medical analysis and diagnosis. This paper proposes a new architecture of the U-Net network for retinal blood vessel segmentation. Adding dense block to U-Net network makes each layer's input come from the all previous layer's output which improves the segmentation accuracy of small blood vessels. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated on two public datasets (DRIVE and CHASE_DB1). The obtained results (DRIVE: Acc = 0.9559, AUC = 0.9793, CHASE_DB1: Acc = 0.9488, AUC = 0.9785) demonstrate the better performance of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Also, the results show that our method achieves better results for the segmentation of small blood vessels and can be helpful to evaluate related ophthalmic diseases.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yin Lin Cheng
- School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
- Department of Medical Informatics, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
| | - Meng Nan Ma
- School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
- Department of Medical Informatics, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
| | - Liang Jun Zhang
- School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
| | - Chen Jin Jin
- Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
| | - Li Ma
- Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
| | - Yi Zhou
- Department of Medical Informatics, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China
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Huang Q, Pan F, Li W, Yuan F, Hu H, Huang J, Yu J, Wang W. Differential Diagnosis of Atypical Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Using Spatio-Temporal Diagnostic Semantics. IEEE J Biomed Health Inform 2020; 24:2860-2869. [PMID: 32149699 DOI: 10.1109/jbhi.2020.2977937] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
Atypical Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) is very hard to distinguish from Focal Nodular Hyperplasia (FNH) in routine imaging. However little attention was paid to this problem. This paper proposes a novel liver tumor Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) approach extracting spatio-temporal semantics for atypical HCC. With respect to useful diagnostic semantics, our model automatically calculates three types of semantic feature with equally down-sampled frames based on Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS). Thereafter, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is trained to make the final diagnosis. Compared with traditional methods for diagnosing HCC, the proposed model has the advantage of less computational complexity and being able to handle the atypical HCC cases. The experimental results show that our method obtained a pretty considerable performance and outperformed two traditional methods. According to the results, the average accuracy reaches 94.40%, recall rate 94.76%, F1-score value 94.62%, specificity 93.62% and sensitivity 94.76%, indicating good merit for automatically diagnosing atypical HCC cases.
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Hu X, Ding D, Li Z, Ge Q, Jiang C, Li J, Zhou Z, Chu D. Axis-guided patch based accurate segmentation for pathological vessels using adaptive weight sparse representation. Biomed Signal Process Control 2020; 57:101817. [DOI: 10.1016/j.bspc.2019.101817] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/23/2022]
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Ni J, Wu J, Wang H, Tong J, Chen Z, Wong KK, Abbott D. Global channel attention networks for intracranial vessel segmentation. Comput Biol Med 2020; 118:103639. [DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.103639] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/09/2019] [Revised: 01/16/2020] [Accepted: 01/28/2020] [Indexed: 12/14/2022]
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Singh P. A neutrosophic-entropy based adaptive thresholding segmentation algorithm: A special application in MR images of Parkinson's disease. Artif Intell Med 2020; 104:101838. [PMID: 32499006 DOI: 10.1016/j.artmed.2020.101838] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/27/2019] [Revised: 02/24/2020] [Accepted: 02/24/2020] [Indexed: 02/06/2023]
Abstract
Brain MR images are composed of three main regions such as gray matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. Radiologists and medical practitioners make decisions through evaluating the developments in these regions. Study of these MR images suffers from two major issues such as: (a) the boundaries of their gray matter and white matter regions are ambiguous and unclear in nature, and (b) their regions are formed with unclear inhomogeneous gray structures. These two issues make the diagnosis of critical diseases very complex. To solve these issues, this study presented a method of image segmentation based on the neutrosophic set (NS) theory and neutrosophic entropy information (NEI). By nature, the proposed method is adaptive to select the threshold value and is entitled as neutrosophic-entropy based adaptive thresholding segmentation algorithm (NEATSA). In this study, experimental results were provided through the segmentation of Parkinson's disease (PD) MR images. Experimental results, including statistical analyses showed that NEATSA can segment the main regions of MR images very clearly compared to the well-known methods of image segmentation available in literature of pattern recognition and computer vision domains.
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Affiliation(s)
- Pritpal Singh
- Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 10608, Taiwan.
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Guo X, Xiao R, Zhang T, Chen C, Wang J, Wang Z. A novel method to model hepatic vascular network using vessel segmentation, thinning, and completion. Med Biol Eng Comput 2020; 58:709-24. [PMID: 31955327 DOI: 10.1007/s11517-020-02128-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/12/2019] [Accepted: 01/13/2020] [Indexed: 01/31/2023]
Abstract
The accurate modeling of the liver vessel network structure is an important prerequisite for developing a preoperative plan for the liver. Considering that extracting liver blood vessels from patient's abdominal computed tomography(CT) images requires several manual operations, this study proposed an automatic segmentation method of liver vessels based on graph cut, thinning, and vascular combination, which can obtain a complete liver vascular network. First, the CT image was preprocessed by grayscale mapping based on sigmoid function, vessel enhancement based on Hessian filter, and denoising based on anisotropic filter to enhance the grayscale contrast between the vascular and non-vascular parts of the liver. Then, the liver vessels were initially segmented based on the improved three-dimensional graph cut algorithm. Based on the obtained liver vascular structure, the vessel centerline of the liver was then extracted by the proposed thinning algorithm that continuously traversed the foreground voxel points and iteratively deleted the simple points. Finally, the combination of vascular centerline optimization was used to predict and link the vascular centerline fractured portion. The under-segmented liver vessels were complemented based on the complete vascular centerline tree. To verify the proposed hepatic vascular segmentation and complementation algorithm, the open 3D Image Reconstruction for Comparison of Algorithm Database (3Dircadb) was applied to test and quantify the results. The results showed that the proposed algorithm can accurately and effectively segment the vascular network structure from abdominal CT images, and the proposed vascular complementation method can restore the true information of under-segmented liver vessels. Graphical abstract A novel hepatic vessel segmentation method from abdominal CT images was proposed, including graph cut algorithm, centerline extraction, and broken vessel completion. First, the graph cut algorithm was used to obtain the initial segmentation result. Then, the centerline of the initial segmentation result was extracted. Finally, the initial segmentation result was optimized through centerline analysis.
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Song S, Du C, Chen Y, Ai D, Song H, Huang Y, Wang Y, Yang J. Inter/intra-frame constrained vascular segmentation in X-ray angiographic image sequence. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 2019; 19:270. [PMID: 31856807 PMCID: PMC6921392 DOI: 10.1186/s12911-019-0966-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/01/2022] Open
Abstract
Background Automatic vascular segmentation in X-ray angiographic image sequence is of crucial interest, for instance, for better quantifying coronary arteries in diagnostic and interventional procedures. Methods A novel inter/intra-frame constrained vascular segmentation method is proposed to automatically segment vessels in coronary X-ray angiographic image sequence. First, a morphological filter operator is applied to remove structures undergoing the respiratory motion from the original image sequence. Second, an inter-frame constrained robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is utilized to remove the quasi-static structures from the image sequence. Third, an intra-frame constrained RPCA is employed to smooth the final extracted vascular sequence. Fourth, a multi-feature fusion is designed to improve the vascular contrast and the final vascular segmentation is realized by thresholding-based method. Results Experiments are conducted on 22 clinical X-ray angiographic image sequences. The global and local contrast-to-noise ratio of the proposed method are 6.6344 and 4.2882, respectively. And the precision, sensitivity and F1 value are 0.7378, 0.7960 and 0.7658, respectively. It demonstrates that our method is effective and robust for vascular segmentation from image sequence. Conclusions The proposed method is effective to remove non-vascular structures, reduce motion artefacts and other non-uniform illumination caused noises. Also, the proposed method is online which can just process one image per time without re-optimizing the model.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shuang Song
- Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
| | - Chenbing Du
- Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
| | - Ying Chen
- Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
| | - Danni Ai
- Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
| | - Hong Song
- AICFVE of Beijing Film Academy, 4 Xitucheng Rd, Haidian, Beijing, 100088, China
| | - Yong Huang
- Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
| | - Yongtian Wang
- Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China.,School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
| | - Jian Yang
- Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China.
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Huang C, Tian J, Yuan C, Zeng P, He X, Chen H, Huang Y, Huang B. Fully Automated Segmentation of Lower Extremity Deep Vein Thrombosis Using Convolutional Neural Network. Biomed Res Int 2019; 2019:3401683. [PMID: 31281832 DOI: 10.1155/2019/3401683] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/15/2019] [Revised: 05/07/2019] [Accepted: 05/26/2019] [Indexed: 11/17/2022]
Abstract
Objective Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is a disease caused by abnormal blood clots in deep veins. Accurate segmentation of DVT is important to facilitate the diagnosis and treatment. In the current study, we proposed a fully automatic method of DVT delineation based on deep learning (DL) and contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) images. Methods 58 patients (25 males; 28~96 years old) with newly diagnosed lower extremity DVT were recruited. CE-MRI was acquired on a 1.5 T system. The ground truth (GT) of DVT lesions was manually contoured. A DL network with an encoder-decoder architecture was designed for DVT segmentation. 8-Fold cross-validation strategy was applied for training and testing. Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) was adopted to evaluate the network's performance. Results It took about 1.5s for our CNN model to perform the segmentation task in a slice of MRI image. The mean DSC of 58 patients was 0.74± 0.17 and the median DSC was 0.79. Compared with other DL models, our CNN model achieved better performance in DVT segmentation (0.74± 0.17 versus 0.66±0.15, 0.55±0.20, and 0.57±0.22). Conclusion Our proposed DL method was effective and fast for fully automatic segmentation of lower extremity DVT.
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Vigneshwaran V, Sands GB, LeGrice IJ, Smaill BH, Smith NP. Reconstruction of coronary circulation networks: A review of methods. Microcirculation 2019; 26:e12542. [DOI: 10.1111/micc.12542] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/13/2018] [Revised: 01/25/2019] [Accepted: 02/27/2019] [Indexed: 12/12/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Vibujithan Vigneshwaran
- Auckland Bioengineering Institute University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
- Faculty of Engineering University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
| | - Gregory B. Sands
- Auckland Bioengineering Institute University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
| | - Ian J. LeGrice
- Department of Physiology University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
| | - Bruce H. Smaill
- Auckland Bioengineering Institute University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
| | - Nicolas P. Smith
- Auckland Bioengineering Institute University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
- Faculty of Engineering University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand
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Huang Q, Sun J, Ding H, Wang X, Wang G. Robust liver vessel extraction using 3D U-Net with variant dice loss function. Comput Biol Med 2018; 101:153-162. [DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2018.08.018] [Citation(s) in RCA: 41] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/22/2018] [Revised: 08/17/2018] [Accepted: 08/17/2018] [Indexed: 10/28/2022]
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Moccia S, De Momi E, El Hadji S, Mattos LS. Blood vessel segmentation algorithms - Review of methods, datasets and evaluation metrics. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 2018; 158:71-91. [PMID: 29544791 DOI: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2018.02.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 211] [Impact Index Per Article: 35.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/03/2017] [Revised: 12/23/2017] [Accepted: 02/02/2018] [Indexed: 05/09/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND Blood vessel segmentation is a topic of high interest in medical image analysis since the analysis of vessels is crucial for diagnosis, treatment planning and execution, and evaluation of clinical outcomes in different fields, including laryngology, neurosurgery and ophthalmology. Automatic or semi-automatic vessel segmentation can support clinicians in performing these tasks. Different medical imaging techniques are currently used in clinical practice and an appropriate choice of the segmentation algorithm is mandatory to deal with the adopted imaging technique characteristics (e.g. resolution, noise and vessel contrast). OBJECTIVE This paper aims at reviewing the most recent and innovative blood vessel segmentation algorithms. Among the algorithms and approaches considered, we deeply investigated the most novel blood vessel segmentation including machine learning, deformable model, and tracking-based approaches. METHODS This paper analyzes more than 100 articles focused on blood vessel segmentation methods. For each analyzed approach, summary tables are presented reporting imaging technique used, anatomical region and performance measures employed. Benefits and disadvantages of each method are highlighted. DISCUSSION Despite the constant progress and efforts addressed in the field, several issues still need to be overcome. A relevant limitation consists in the segmentation of pathological vessels. Unfortunately, not consistent research effort has been addressed to this issue yet. Research is needed since some of the main assumptions made for healthy vessels (such as linearity and circular cross-section) do not hold in pathological tissues, which on the other hand require new vessel model formulations. Moreover, image intensity drops, noise and low contrast still represent an important obstacle for the achievement of a high-quality enhancement. This is particularly true for optical imaging, where the image quality is usually lower in terms of noise and contrast with respect to magnetic resonance and computer tomography angiography. CONCLUSION No single segmentation approach is suitable for all the different anatomical region or imaging modalities, thus the primary goal of this review was to provide an up to date source of information about the state of the art of the vessel segmentation algorithms so that the most suitable methods can be chosen according to the specific task.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sara Moccia
- Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy; Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy.
| | - Elena De Momi
- Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
| | - Sara El Hadji
- Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.
| | - Leonardo S Mattos
- Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy
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Yang X, Yang JD, Hwang HP, Yu HC, Ahn S, Kim BW, You H. Segmentation of liver and vessels from CT images and classification of liver segments for preoperative liver surgical planning in living donor liver transplantation. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 2018; 158:41-52. [PMID: 29544789 DOI: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2017.12.008] [Citation(s) in RCA: 23] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/16/2017] [Revised: 11/13/2017] [Accepted: 12/11/2017] [Indexed: 06/08/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE The present study developed an effective surgical planning method consisting of a liver extraction stage, a vessel extraction stage, and a liver segment classification stage based on abdominal computerized tomography (CT) images. METHODS An automatic seed point identification method, customized level set methods, and an automated thresholding method were applied in this study to extraction of the liver, portal vein (PV), and hepatic vein (HV) from CT images. Then, a semi-automatic method was developed to separate PV and HV. Lastly, a local searching method was proposed for identification of PV branches and the nearest neighbor approximation method was applied to classifying liver segments. RESULTS Onsite evaluation of liver segmentation provided by the SLIVER07 website showed that the liver segmentation method achieved an average volumetric overlap accuracy of 95.2%. An expert radiologist evaluation of vessel segmentation showed no false positive errors or misconnections between PV and HV in the extracted vessel trees. Clinical evaluation of liver segment classification using 43 CT datasets from two medical centers showed that the proposed method achieved high accuracy in liver graft volumetry (absolute error, AE = 45.2 ± 20.9 ml; percentage of AE, %AE = 6.8% ± 3.2%; percentage of %AE > 10% = 16.3%; percentage of %AE > 20% = none) and the classified segment boundaries agreed with the intraoperative surgical cutting boundaries by visual inspection. CONCLUSIONS The method in this study is effective in segmentation of liver and vessels and classification of liver segments and can be applied to preoperative liver surgical planning in living donor liver transplantation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiaopeng Yang
- Department of Industrial Management and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 37673, South Korea
| | - Jae Do Yang
- Department of Surgery, Chonbuk National University Medical School, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute of Clinical Medicine of Chonbuk National University-Biomedical Research Institute of Chonbuk University Hospital, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute for Endocrine Sciences, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea
| | - Hong Pil Hwang
- Department of Surgery, Chonbuk National University Medical School, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute of Clinical Medicine of Chonbuk National University-Biomedical Research Institute of Chonbuk University Hospital, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute for Endocrine Sciences, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea
| | - Hee Chul Yu
- Department of Surgery, Chonbuk National University Medical School, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute of Clinical Medicine of Chonbuk National University-Biomedical Research Institute of Chonbuk University Hospital, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute for Endocrine Sciences, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea.
| | - Sungwoo Ahn
- Department of Surgery, Chonbuk National University Medical School, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute of Clinical Medicine of Chonbuk National University-Biomedical Research Institute of Chonbuk University Hospital, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea; Research Institute for Endocrine Sciences, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, 54907, South Korea
| | - Bong-Wan Kim
- Department of Liver Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery, Ajou University School of Medicine, Suwon, 16499, South Korea
| | - Heecheon You
- Department of Industrial Management and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 37673, South Korea
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Ibragimov B, Toesca D, Chang D, Koong A, Xing L. Combining deep learning with anatomical analysis for segmentation of the portal vein for liver SBRT planning. Phys Med Biol 2017; 62:8943-8958. [PMID: 28994665 DOI: 10.1088/1361-6560/aa9262] [Citation(s) in RCA: 51] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/06/2023]
Abstract
Automated segmentation of the portal vein (PV) for liver radiotherapy planning is a challenging task due to potentially low vasculature contrast, complex PV anatomy and image artifacts originated from fiducial markers and vasculature stents. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for automated segmentation of the PV from computed tomography (CT) images. We apply convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn the consistent appearance patterns of the PV using a training set of CT images with reference annotations and then enhance the PV in previously unseen CT images. Markov random fields (MRFs) were further used to smooth the results of the enhancement of the CNN enhancement and remove isolated mis-segmented regions. Finally, CNN-MRF-based enhancement was augmented with PV centerline detection that relied on PV anatomical properties such as tubularity and branch composition. The framework was validated on a clinical database with 72 CT images of patients scheduled for liver stereotactic body radiation therapy. The obtained accuracy of the segmentation was [Formula: see text] 0.83 and [Formula: see text] 1.08 mm in terms of the median Dice coefficient and mean symmetric surface distance, respectively, when segmentation is encompassed into the PV region of interest. The obtained results indicate that CNNs and anatomical analysis can be used for the accurate segmentation of the PV and potentially integrated into liver radiation therapy planning.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bulat Ibragimov
- Department of Radiation Oncology, Stanford University School of Medicine, 875 Blake Wilbur Drive, Palo Alto, CA 94305, United States of America
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