1,115 research outputs found
Multi-Planar Deep Segmentation Networks for Cardiac Substructures from MRI and CT
Non-invasive detection of cardiovascular disorders from radiology scans
requires quantitative image analysis of the heart and its substructures. There
are well-established measurements that radiologists use for diseases assessment
such as ejection fraction, volume of four chambers, and myocardium mass. These
measurements are derived as outcomes of precise segmentation of the heart and
its substructures. The aim of this paper is to provide such measurements
through an accurate image segmentation algorithm that automatically delineates
seven substructures of the heart from MRI and/or CT scans. Our proposed method
is based on multi-planar deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) with an
adaptive fusion strategy where we automatically utilize complementary
information from different planes of the 3D scans for improved delineations.
For CT and MRI, we have separately designed three CNNs (the same architectural
configuration) for three planes, and have trained the networks from scratch for
voxel-wise labeling for the following cardiac structures: myocardium of left
ventricle (Myo), left atrium (LA), left ventricle (LV), right atrium (RA),
right ventricle (RV), ascending aorta (Ao), and main pulmonary artery (PA). We
have evaluated the proposed method with 4-fold-cross validation on the
multi-modality whole heart segmentation challenge (MM-WHS 2017) dataset. The
precision and dice index of 0.93 and 0.90, and 0.87 and 0.85 were achieved for
CT and MR images, respectively. While a CT volume was segmented about 50
seconds, an MRI scan was segmented around 17 seconds with the GPUs/CUDA
implementation.Comment: The paper is accepted to STACOM 201
Explainable cardiac pathology classification on cine MRI with motion characterization by semi-supervised learning of apparent flow
We propose a method to classify cardiac pathology based on a novel approach
to extract image derived features to characterize the shape and motion of the
heart. An original semi-supervised learning procedure, which makes efficient
use of a large amount of non-segmented images and a small amount of images
segmented manually by experts, is developed to generate pixel-wise apparent
flow between two time points of a 2D+t cine MRI image sequence. Combining the
apparent flow maps and cardiac segmentation masks, we obtain a local apparent
flow corresponding to the 2D motion of myocardium and ventricular cavities.
This leads to the generation of time series of the radius and thickness of
myocardial segments to represent cardiac motion. These time series of motion
features are reliable and explainable characteristics of pathological cardiac
motion. Furthermore, they are combined with shape-related features to classify
cardiac pathologies. Using only nine feature values as input, we propose an
explainable, simple and flexible model for pathology classification. On ACDC
training set and testing set, the model achieves 95% and 94% respectively as
classification accuracy. Its performance is hence comparable to that of the
state-of-the-art. Comparison with various other models is performed to outline
some advantages of our model
Computational Methods for Segmentation of Multi-Modal Multi-Dimensional Cardiac Images
Segmentation of the heart structures helps compute the cardiac contractile function quantified via the systolic and diastolic volumes, ejection fraction, and myocardial mass, representing a reliable diagnostic value. Similarly, quantification of the myocardial mechanics throughout the cardiac cycle, analysis of the activation patterns in the heart via electrocardiography (ECG) signals, serve as good cardiac diagnosis indicators. Furthermore, high quality anatomical models of the heart can be used in planning and guidance of minimally invasive interventions under the assistance of image guidance.
The most crucial step for the above mentioned applications is to segment the ventricles and myocardium from the acquired cardiac image data. Although the manual delineation of the heart structures is deemed as the gold-standard approach, it requires significant time and effort, and is highly susceptible to inter- and intra-observer variability. These limitations suggest a need for fast, robust, and accurate semi- or fully-automatic segmentation algorithms. However, the complex motion and anatomy of the heart, indistinct borders due to blood flow, the presence of trabeculations, intensity inhomogeneity, and various other imaging artifacts, makes the segmentation task challenging.
In this work, we present and evaluate segmentation algorithms for multi-modal, multi-dimensional cardiac image datasets. Firstly, we segment the left ventricle (LV) blood-pool from a tri-plane 2D+time trans-esophageal (TEE) ultrasound acquisition using local phase based filtering and graph-cut technique, propagate the segmentation throughout the cardiac cycle using non-rigid registration-based motion extraction, and reconstruct the 3D LV geometry. Secondly, we segment the LV blood-pool and myocardium from an open-source 4D cardiac cine Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) dataset by incorporating average atlas based shape constraint into the graph-cut framework and iterative segmentation refinement. The developed fast and robust framework is further extended to perform right ventricle (RV) blood-pool segmentation from a different open-source 4D cardiac cine MRI dataset. Next, we employ convolutional neural network based multi-task learning framework to segment the myocardium and regress its area, simultaneously, and show that segmentation based computation of the myocardial area is significantly better than that regressed directly from the network, while also being more interpretable. Finally, we impose a weak shape constraint via multi-task learning framework in a fully convolutional network and show improved segmentation performance for LV, RV and myocardium across healthy and pathological cases, as well as, in the challenging apical and basal slices in two open-source 4D cardiac cine MRI datasets.
We demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed segmentation methods by comparing the obtained results against the provided gold-standard manual segmentations, as well as with other competing segmentation methods
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