24,586 research outputs found
Graph Refinement based Airway Extraction using Mean-Field Networks and Graph Neural Networks
Graph refinement, or the task of obtaining subgraphs of interest from
over-complete graphs, can have many varied applications. In this work, we
extract trees or collection of sub-trees from image data by, first deriving a
graph-based representation of the volumetric data and then, posing the tree
extraction as a graph refinement task. We present two methods to perform graph
refinement. First, we use mean-field approximation (MFA) to approximate the
posterior density over the subgraphs from which the optimal subgraph of
interest can be estimated. Mean field networks (MFNs) are used for inference
based on the interpretation that iterations of MFA can be seen as feed-forward
operations in a neural network. This allows us to learn the model parameters
using gradient descent. Second, we present a supervised learning approach using
graph neural networks (GNNs) which can be seen as generalisations of MFNs.
Subgraphs are obtained by training a GNN-based graph refinement model to
directly predict edge probabilities. We discuss connections between the two
classes of methods and compare them for the task of extracting airways from 3D,
low-dose, chest CT data. We show that both the MFN and GNN models show
significant improvement when compared to one baseline method, that is similar
to a top performing method in the EXACT'09 Challenge, and a 3D U-Net based
airway segmentation model, in detecting more branches with fewer false
positives.Comment: Accepted for publication at Medical Image Analysis. 14 page
Automatic 3D bi-ventricular segmentation of cardiac images by a shape-refined multi-task deep learning approach
Deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art performance in
cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image segmentation. However, most approaches
have focused on learning image intensity features for segmentation, whereas the
incorporation of anatomical shape priors has received less attention. In this
paper, we combine a multi-task deep learning approach with atlas propagation to
develop a shape-constrained bi-ventricular segmentation pipeline for short-axis
CMR volumetric images. The pipeline first employs a fully convolutional network
(FCN) that learns segmentation and landmark localisation tasks simultaneously.
The architecture of the proposed FCN uses a 2.5D representation, thus combining
the computational advantage of 2D FCNs networks and the capability of
addressing 3D spatial consistency without compromising segmentation accuracy.
Moreover, the refinement step is designed to explicitly enforce a shape
constraint and improve segmentation quality. This step is effective for
overcoming image artefacts (e.g. due to different breath-hold positions and
large slice thickness), which preclude the creation of anatomically meaningful
3D cardiac shapes. The proposed pipeline is fully automated, due to network's
ability to infer landmarks, which are then used downstream in the pipeline to
initialise atlas propagation. We validate the pipeline on 1831 healthy subjects
and 649 subjects with pulmonary hypertension. Extensive numerical experiments
on the two datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is robust and capable
of producing accurate, high-resolution and anatomically smooth bi-ventricular
3D models, despite the artefacts in input CMR volumes
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