No Arabic abstract
Retinal artery/vein (A/V) classification lays the foundation for the quantitative analysis of retinal vessels, which is associated with potential risks of various cardiovascular and cerebral diseases. The topological connection relationship, which has been proved effective in improving the A/V classification performance for the conventional graph based method, has not been exploited by the deep learning based method. In this paper, we propose a Topology Ranking Generative Adversarial Network (TR-GAN) to improve the topology connectivity of the segmented arteries and veins, and further to boost the A/V classification performance. A topology ranking discriminator based on ordinal regression is proposed to rank the topological connectivity level of the ground-truth, the generated A/V mask and the intentionally shuffled mask. The ranking loss is further back-propagated to the generator to generate better connected A/V masks. In addition, a topology preserving module with triplet loss is also proposed to extract the high-level topological features and further to narrow the feature distance between the predicted A/V mask and the ground-truth. The proposed framework effectively increases the topological connectivity of the predicted A/V masks and achieves state-of-the-art A/V classification performance on the publicly available AV-DRIVE dataset.
Retinal artery/vein (A/V) classification plays a critical role in the clinical biomarker study of how various systemic and cardiovascular diseases affect the retinal vessels. Conventional methods of automated A/V classification are generally complicated and heavily depend on the accurate vessel segmentation. In this paper, we propose a multi-task deep neural network with spatial activation mechanism that is able to segment full retinal vessel, artery and vein simultaneously, without the pre-requirement of vessel segmentation. The input module of the network integrates the domain knowledge of widely used retinal preprocessing and vessel enhancement techniques. We specially customize the output block of the network with a spatial activation mechanism, which takes advantage of a relatively easier task of vessel segmentation and exploits it to boost the performance of A/V classification. In addition, deep supervision is introduced to the network to assist the low level layers to extract more semantic information. The proposed network achieves pixel-wise accuracy of 95.70% for vessel segmentation, and A/V classification accuracy of 94.50%, which is the state-of-the-art performance for both tasks on the AV-DRIVE dataset. Furthermore, we have also tested the model performance on INSPIRE-AVR dataset, which achieves a skeletal A/V classification accuracy of 91.6%.
With the development of medical computer-aided diagnostic systems, pulmonary artery-vein(A/V) separation plays a crucial role in assisting doctors in preoperative planning for lung cancer surgery. However, distinguishing arterial from venous irrigation in chest CT images remains a challenge due to the similarity and complex structure of the arteries and veins. We propose a novel method for automatic separation of pulmonary arteries and veins from chest CT images. The method consists of three parts. First, global connection information and local feature information are used to construct a complete topological tree and ensure the continuity of vessel reconstruction. Second, the Twin-Pipe network proposed can automatically learn the differences between arteries and veins at different levels to reduce classification errors caused by changes in terminal vessel characteristics. Finally, the topology optimizer considers interbranch and intrabranch topological relationships to maintain spatial consistency to avoid the misclassification of A/V irrigations. We validate the performance of the method on chest CT images. Compared with manual classification, the proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 96.2% on noncontrast chest CT. In addition, the method has been proven to have good generalization, that is, the accuracies of 93.8% and 94.8% are obtained for CT scans from other devices and other modes, respectively. The result of pulmonary artery-vein obtained by the proposed method can provide better assistance for preoperative planning of lung cancer surgery.
Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for segmentation of pulmonary airway, artery, and vein is challenging due to sparse supervisory signals caused by the severe class imbalance between tubular targets and background. We present a CNNs-based method for accurate airway and artery-vein segmentation in non-contrast computed tomography. It enjoys superior sensitivity to tenuous peripheral bronchioles, arterioles, and venules. The method first uses a feature recalibration module to make the best use of features learned from the neural networks. Spatial information of features is properly integrated to retain relative priority of activated regions, which benefits the subsequent channel-wise recalibration. Then, attention distillation module is introduced to reinforce representation learning of tubular objects. Fine-grained details in high-resolution attention maps are passing down from one layer to its previous layer recursively to enrich context. Anatomy prior of lung context map and distance transform map is designed and incorporated for better artery-vein differentiation capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrated considerable performance gains brought by these components. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our method extracted much more branches while maintaining competitive overall segmentation performance. Codes and models are available at http://www.pami.sjtu.edu.cn/News/56
Retinal artery/vein (A/V) classification is a critical technique for diagnosing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Although deep learning based methods achieve impressive results in A/V classification, their performances usually degrade severely when being directly applied to another database, due to the domain shift, e.g., caused by the variations in imaging protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel vessel-mixing based consistency regularization framework, for cross-domain learning in retinal A/V classification. Specially, to alleviate the severe bias to source domain, based on the label smooth prior, the model is regularized to give consistent predictions for unlabeled target-domain inputs that are under perturbation. This consistency regularization implicitly introduces a mechanism where the model and the perturbation is opponent to each other, where the model is pushed to be robust enough to cope with the perturbation. Thus, we investigate a more difficult opponent to further inspire the robustness of model, in the scenario of retinal A/V, called vessel-mixing perturbation. Specially, it effectively disturbs the fundus images especially the vessel structures by mixing two images regionally. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-domain A/V classification using four public datasets, which are collected by diverse institutions and imaging devices. The results demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art cross-domain performance, which is also close to the upper bound obtained by fully supervised learning on target domain.
This study is to demonstrate deep learning for automated artery-vein (AV) classification in optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA). The AV-Net, a fully convolutional network (FCN) based on modified U-shaped CNN architecture, incorporates enface OCT and OCTA to differentiate arteries and veins. For the multi-modal training process, the enface OCT works as a near infrared fundus image to provide vessel intensity profiles, and the OCTA contains blood flow strength and vessel geometry features. A transfer learning process is also integrated to compensate for the limitation of available dataset size of OCTA, which is a relatively new imaging modality. By providing an average accuracy of 86.75%, the AV-Net promises a fully automated platform to foster clinical deployment of differential AV analysis in OCTA.