465 research outputs found
Recurrent Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Multi-slice MRI Cardiac Segmentation
In cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, fully-automatic segmentation of the
heart enables precise structural and functional measurements to be taken, e.g.
from short-axis MR images of the left-ventricle. In this work we propose a
recurrent fully-convolutional network (RFCN) that learns image representations
from the full stack of 2D slices and has the ability to leverage inter-slice
spatial dependences through internal memory units. RFCN combines anatomical
detection and segmentation into a single architecture that is trained
end-to-end thus significantly reducing computational time, simplifying the
segmentation pipeline, and potentially enabling real-time applications. We
report on an investigation of RFCN using two datasets, including the publicly
available MICCAI 2009 Challenge dataset. Comparisons have been carried out
between fully convolutional networks and deep restricted Boltzmann machines,
including a recurrent version that leverages inter-slice spatial correlation.
Our studies suggest that RFCN produces state-of-the-art results and can
substantially improve the delineation of contours near the apex of the heart.Comment: MICCAI Workshop RAMBO 201
Deep Learning in Cardiology
The medical field is creating large amount of data that physicians are unable
to decipher and use efficiently. Moreover, rule-based expert systems are
inefficient in solving complicated medical tasks or for creating insights using
big data. Deep learning has emerged as a more accurate and effective technology
in a wide range of medical problems such as diagnosis, prediction and
intervention. Deep learning is a representation learning method that consists
of layers that transform the data non-linearly, thus, revealing hierarchical
relationships and structures. In this review we survey deep learning
application papers that use structured data, signal and imaging modalities from
cardiology. We discuss the advantages and limitations of applying deep learning
in cardiology that also apply in medicine in general, while proposing certain
directions as the most viable for clinical use.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, 10 table
GridNet with automatic shape prior registration for automatic MRI cardiac segmentation
In this paper, we propose a fully automatic MRI cardiac segmentation method
based on a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for the 2017
ACDC MICCAI challenge. The novelty of our network comes with its embedded shape
prior and its loss function tailored to the cardiac anatomy. Our model includes
a cardiac centerof-mass regression module which allows for an automatic shape
prior registration. Also, since our method processes raw MR images without any
manual preprocessing and/or image cropping, our CNN learns both high-level
features (useful to distinguish the heart from other organs with a similar
shape) and low-level features (useful to get accurate segmentation results).
Those features are learned with a multi-resolution conv-deconv "grid"
architecture which can be seen as an extension of the U-Net. Experimental
results reveal that our method can segment the left and right ventricles as
well as the myocardium from a 3D MRI cardiac volume in 0.4 second with an
average Dice coefficient of 0.90 and an average Hausdorff distance of 10.4 mm.Comment: 8 pages, 1 tables, 2 figure
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
Automatic Segmentation Measuring Function for Cardiac MR-Left Ventricle (LV) Images
Automatic segmentation approaches are a desirable solution for Endocardium (inner) and Epicardium (outer) contours delineation using cardiac magnetic resonance left ventricle (CMR-LV) short axis images. The Level Set Model (LSM) and Variational LSM (VLSM) is the state-of-the-art in detecting the inner and outer contour for medical images. However, in CMR-LV images segmentation the LSM and VLSM are facing with the issue of re-initialisation because of irregular circle shape. In this paper, we developed an automatic segmentation measuring function based on statistical formulation to solve the re-initialisation issues in huge set of data images. The sign Euclidean distance function successfully classified the negative (inner contour) and positive (outer contour) features. The Fuzzy C mean interaction operator intersects the high membership degree that initialises the centre point. The experiments were conducted using the Sunnybrook and Pusat Juntung Hospital Umum Sarawak (PJHUS) cardiac datasets. This paper aims at developing a distance function to guide the automatic segmentation for LV contours and also to reduce segmentation error
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