298 research outputs found
Adversarial Convolutional Networks with Weak Domain-Transfer for Multi-sequence Cardiac MR Images Segmentation
Analysis and modeling of the ventricles and myocardium are important in the
diagnostic and treatment of heart diseases. Manual delineation of those tissues
in cardiac MR (CMR) scans is laborious and time-consuming. The ambiguity of the
boundaries makes the segmentation task rather challenging. Furthermore, the
annotations on some modalities such as Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) MRI,
are often not available. We propose an end-to-end segmentation framework based
on convolutional neural network (CNN) and adversarial learning. A dilated
residual U-shape network is used as a segmentor to generate the prediction
mask; meanwhile, a CNN is utilized as a discriminator model to judge the
segmentation quality. To leverage the available annotations across modalities
per patient, a new loss function named weak domain-transfer loss is introduced
to the pipeline. The proposed model is evaluated on the public dataset released
by the challenge organizer in MICCAI 2019, which consists of 45 sets of
multi-sequence CMR images. We demonstrate that the proposed adversarial
pipeline outperforms baseline deep-learning methods.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, conferenc
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
Improving the Generalizability of Convolutional Neural Network-Based Segmentation on CMR Images
Background: Convolutional neural network (CNN) based segmentation methods provide an efficient and automated way for clinicians to assess the structure and function of the heart in cardiac MR images. While CNNs can generally perform the segmentation tasks with high accuracy when training and test images come from the same domain (e.g., same scanner or site), their performance often degrades dramatically on images from different scanners or clinical sites. /
Methods: We propose a simple yet effective way for improving the network generalization ability by carefully designing data normalization and augmentation strategies to accommodate common scenarios in multi-site, multi-scanner clinical imaging data sets. We demonstrate that a neural network trained on a single-site single-scanner dataset from the UK Biobank can be successfully applied to segmenting cardiac MR images across different sites and different scanners without substantial loss of accuracy. Specifically, the method was trained on a large set of 3,975 subjects from the UK Biobank. It was then directly tested on 600 different subjects from the UK Biobank for intra-domain testing and two other sets for cross-domain testing: the ACDC dataset (100 subjects, 1 site, 2 scanners) and the BSCMR-AS dataset (599 subjects, 6 sites, 9 scanners). /
Results: The proposed method produces promising segmentation results on the UK Biobank test set which are comparable to previously reported values in the literature, while also performing well on cross-domain test sets, achieving a mean Dice metric of 0.90 for the left ventricle, 0.81 for the myocardium, and 0.82 for the right ventricle on the ACDC dataset; and 0.89 for the left ventricle, 0.83 for the myocardium on the BSCMR-AS dataset. /
Conclusions: The proposed method offers a potential solution to improve CNN-based model generalizability for the cross-scanner and cross-site cardiac MR image segmentation task
Improving the Generalizability of Convolutional Neural Network-Based Segmentation on CMR Images
Convolutional neural network (CNN) based segmentation methods provide an efficient and automated way for clinicians to assess the structure and function of the heart in cardiac MR images. While CNNs can generally perform the segmentation tasks with high accuracy when training and test images come from the same domain (e.g. same scanner or site), their performance often degrades dramatically on images from different scanners or clinical sites. We propose a simple yet effective way for improving the network generalization ability by carefully designing data normalization and augmentation strategies to accommodate common scenarios in multi-site, multi-scanner clinical imaging data sets. We demonstrate that a neural network trained on a single-site single-scanner dataset from the UK Biobank can be successfully applied to segmenting cardiac MR images across different sites and different scanners without substantial loss of accuracy. Specifically, the method was trained on a large set of 3,975 subjects from the UK Biobank. It was then directly tested on 600 different subjects from the UK Biobank for intra-domain testing and two other sets for cross-domain testing: the ACDC dataset (100 subjects, 1 site, 2 scanners) and the BSCMR-AS dataset (599 subjects, 6 sites, 9 scanners). The proposed method produces promising segmentation results on the UK Biobank test set which are comparable to previously reported values in the literature, while also performing well on cross-domain test sets, achieving a mean Dice metric of 0.90 for the left ventricle, 0.81 for the myocardium and 0.82 for the right ventricle on the ACDC dataset; and 0.89 for the left ventricle, 0.83 for the myocardium on the BSCMR-AS dataset. The proposed method offers a potential solution to improve CNN-based model generalizability for the cross-scanner and cross-site cardiac MR image segmentation task
Automated segmentation on the entire cardiac cycle using a deep learning work-flow
The segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) from CINE MRI images is essential
to infer important clinical parameters. Typically, machine learning algorithms
for automated LV segmentation use annotated contours from only two cardiac
phases, diastole, and systole. In this work, we present an analysis work-flow
for fully-automated LV segmentation that learns from images acquired through
the cardiac cycle. The workflow consists of three components: first, for each
image in the sequence, we perform an automated localization and subsequent
cropping of the bounding box containing the cardiac silhouette. Second, we
identify the LV contours using a Temporal Fully Convolutional Neural Network
(T-FCNN), which extends Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNN) through a
recurrent mechanism enforcing temporal coherence across consecutive frames.
Finally, we further defined the boundaries using either one of two components:
fully-connected Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) with Gaussian edge potentials
and Semantic Flow. Our initial experiments suggest that significant improvement
in performance can potentially be achieved by using a recurrent neural network
component that explicitly learns cardiac motion patterns whilst performing LV
segmentation.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, published on IEEE Xplor
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