43 research outputs found
Medical Image Analysis on Left Atrial LGE MRI for Atrial Fibrillation Studies: A Review
Late gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (LGE MRI) is commonly
used to visualize and quantify left atrial (LA) scars. The position and extent
of scars provide important information of the pathophysiology and progression
of atrial fibrillation (AF). Hence, LA scar segmentation and quantification
from LGE MRI can be useful in computer-assisted diagnosis and treatment
stratification of AF patients. Since manual delineation can be time-consuming
and subject to intra- and inter-expert variability, automating this computing
is highly desired, which nevertheless is still challenging and
under-researched.
This paper aims to provide a systematic review on computing methods for LA
cavity, wall, scar and ablation gap segmentation and quantification from LGE
MRI, and the related literature for AF studies. Specifically, we first
summarize AF-related imaging techniques, particularly LGE MRI. Then, we review
the methodologies of the four computing tasks in detail, and summarize the
validation strategies applied in each task. Finally, the possible future
developments are outlined, with a brief survey on the potential clinical
applications of the aforementioned methods. The review shows that the research
into this topic is still in early stages. Although several methods have been
proposed, especially for LA segmentation, there is still large scope for
further algorithmic developments due to performance issues related to the high
variability of enhancement appearance and differences in image acquisition.Comment: 23 page
Multi-Modality Pathology Segmentation Framework: Application to Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images
Multi-sequence of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images can provide
complementary information for myocardial pathology (scar and edema). However,
it is still challenging to fuse these underlying information for pathology
segmentation effectively. This work presents an automatic cascade pathology
segmentation framework based on multi-modality CMR images. It mainly consists
of two neural networks: an anatomical structure segmentation network (ASSN) and
a pathological region segmentation network (PRSN). Specifically, the ASSN aims
to segment the anatomical structure where the pathology may exist, and it can
provide a spatial prior for the pathological region segmentation. In addition,
we integrate a denoising auto-encoder (DAE) into the ASSN to generate
segmentation results with plausible shapes. The PRSN is designed to segment
pathological region based on the result of ASSN, in which a fusion block based
on channel attention is proposed to better aggregate multi-modality information
from multi-modality CMR images. Experiments from the MyoPS2020 challenge
dataset show that our framework can achieve promising performance for
myocardial scar and edema segmentation.Comment: 12 pages,MyoPS 202
Simultaneous left atrium anatomy and scar segmentations via deep learning in multiview information with attention
Three-dimensional late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) cardiac MR (CMR) of left atrial scar in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) has recently emerged as a promising technique to stratify patients, to guide ablation therapy and to predict treatment success. This requires a segmentation of the high intensity scar tissue and also a segmentation of the left atrium (LA) anatomy, the latter usually being derived from a separate bright-blood acquisition. Performing both segmentations automatically from a single 3D LGE CMR acquisition would eliminate the need for an additional acquisition and avoid subsequent registration issues. In this paper, we propose a joint segmentation method based on multiview two-task (MVTT) recursive attention model working directly on 3D LGE CMR images to segment the LA (and proximal pulmonary veins) and to delineate the scar on the same dataset. Using our MVTT recursive attention model, both the LA anatomy and scar can be segmented accurately (mean Dice score of 93% for the LA anatomy and 87% for the scar segmentations) and efficiently (0.27 s to simultaneously segment the LA anatomy and scars directly from the 3D LGE CMR dataset with 60–68 2D slices). Compared to conventional unsupervised learning and other state-of-the-art deep learning based methods, the proposed MVTT model achieved excellent results, leading to an automatic generation of a patient-specific anatomical model combined with scar segmentation for patients in AF
AtrialGeneral: Domain Generalization for Left Atrial Segmentation of Multi-Center LGE MRIs
Left atrial (LA) segmentation from late gadolinium enhanced magnetic
resonance imaging (LGE MRI) is a crucial step needed for planning the treatment
of atrial fibrillation. However, automatic LA segmentation from LGE MRI is
still challenging, due to the poor image quality, high variability in LA
shapes, and unclear LA boundary. Though deep learning-based methods can provide
promising LA segmentation results, they often generalize poorly to unseen
domains, such as data from different scanners and/or sites. In this work, we
collect 210 LGE MRIs from different centers with different levels of image
quality. To evaluate the domain generalization ability of models on the LA
segmentation task, we employ four commonly used semantic segmentation networks
for the LA segmentation from multi-center LGE MRIs. Besides, we investigate
three domain generalization strategies, i.e., histogram matching, mutual
information based disentangled representation, and random style transfer, where
a simple histogram matching is proved to be most effective.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, MICCAI202
MyoPS-Net: Myocardial Pathology Segmentation with Flexible Combination of Multi-Sequence CMR Images
Myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) can be a prerequisite for the
accurate diagnosis and treatment planning of myocardial infarction. However,
achieving this segmentation is challenging, mainly due to the inadequate and
indistinct information from an image. In this work, we develop an end-to-end
deep neural network, referred to as MyoPS-Net, to flexibly combine
five-sequence cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images for MyoPS. To extract
precise and adequate information, we design an effective yet flexible
architecture to extract and fuse cross-modal features. This architecture can
tackle different numbers of CMR images and complex combinations of modalities,
with output branches targeting specific pathologies. To impose anatomical
knowledge on the segmentation results, we first propose a module to regularize
myocardium consistency and localize the pathologies, and then introduce an
inclusiveness loss to utilize relations between myocardial scars and edema. We
evaluated the proposed MyoPS-Net on two datasets, i.e., a private one
consisting of 50 paired multi-sequence CMR images and a public one from
MICCAI2020 MyoPS Challenge. Experimental results showed that MyoPS-Net could
achieve state-of-the-art performance in various scenarios. Note that in
practical clinics, the subjects may not have full sequences, such as missing
LGE CMR or mapping CMR scans. We therefore conducted extensive experiments to
investigate the performance of the proposed method in dealing with such complex
combinations of different CMR sequences. Results proved the superiority and
generalizability of MyoPS-Net, and more importantly, indicated a practical
clinical application