No Arabic abstract
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.
Cardiac MR image segmentation is essential for the morphological and functional analysis of the heart. Inspired by how experienced clinicians assess the cardiac morphology and function across multiple standard views (i.e. long- and short-axis views), we propose a novel approach which learns anatomical shape priors across different 2D standard views and leverages these priors to segment the left ventricular (LV) myocardium from short-axis MR image stacks. The proposed segmentation method has the advantage of being a 2D network but at the same time incorporates spatial context from multiple, complementary views that span a 3D space. Our method achieves accurate and robust segmentation of the myocardium across different short-axis slices (from apex to base), outperforming baseline models (e.g. 2D U-Net, 3D U-Net) while achieving higher data efficiency. Compared to the 2D U-Net, the proposed method reduces the mean Hausdorff distance (mm) from 3.24 to 2.49 on the apical slices, from 2.34 to 2.09 on the middle slices and from 3.62 to 2.76 on the basal slices on the test set, when only 10% of the training data was used.
Accurate segmentation of the cardiac boundaries in late gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance images (LGE-MRI) is a fundamental step for accurate quantification of scar tissue. However, while there are many solutions for automatic cardiac segmentation of cine images, the presence of scar tissue can make the correct delineation of the myocardium in LGE-MRI challenging even for human experts. As part of the Multi-Sequence Cardiac MR Segmentation Challenge, we propose a solution for LGE-MRI segmentation based on two components. First, a generative adversarial network is trained for the task of modality-to-modality translation between cine and LGE-MRI sequences to obtain extra synthetic images for both modalities. Second, a deep learning model is trained for segmentation with different combinations of original, augmented and synthetic sequences. Our results based on three magnetic resonance sequences (LGE, bSSFP and T2) from 45 different patients show that the multi-sequence model training integrating synthetic images and data augmentation improves in the segmentation over conventional training with real datasets. In conclusion, the accuracy of the segmentation of LGE-MRI images can be improved by using complementary information provided by non-contrast MRI sequences.
Automatic cell segmentation is an essential step in the pipeline of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), such as the detection and grading of breast cancer. Accurate segmentation of cells can not only assist the pathologists to make a more precise diagnosis, but also save much time and labor. However, this task suffers from stain variation, cell inhomogeneous intensities, background clutters and cells from different tissues. To address these issues, we propose an Attention Enforced Network (AENet), which is built on spatial attention module and channel attention module, to integrate local features with global dependencies and weight effective channels adaptively. Besides, we introduce a feature fusion branch to bridge high-level and low-level features. Finally, the marker controlled watershed algorithm is applied to post-process the predicted segmentation maps for reducing the fragmented regions. In the test stage, we present an individual color normalization method to deal with the stain variation problem. We evaluate this model on the MoNuSeg dataset. The quantitative comparisons against several prior methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Accurate computing, analysis and modeling of the ventricles and myocardium from medical images are important, especially in the diagnosis and treatment management for patients suffering from myocardial infarction (MI). Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) provides an important protocol to visualize MI. However, automated segmentation of LGE CMR is still challenging, due to the indistinguishable boundaries, heterogeneous intensity distribution and complex enhancement patterns of pathological myocardium from LGE CMR. Furthermore, compared with the other sequences LGE CMR images with gold standard labels are particularly limited, which represents another obstacle for developing novel algorithms for automatic segmentation of LGE CMR. This paper presents the selective results from the Multi-Sequence Cardiac MR (MS-CMR) Segmentation challenge, in conjunction with MICCAI 2019. The challenge offered a data set of paired MS-CMR images, including auxiliary CMR sequences as well as LGE CMR, from 45 patients who underwent cardiomyopathy. It was aimed to develop new algorithms, as well as benchmark existing ones for LGE CMR segmentation and compare them objectively. In addition, the paired MS-CMR images could enable algorithms to combine the complementary information from the other sequences for the segmentation of LGE CMR. Nine representative works were selected for evaluation and comparisons, among which three methods are unsupervised methods and the other six are supervised. The results showed that the average performance of the nine methods was comparable to the inter-observer variations. The success of these methods was mainly attributed to the inclusion of the auxiliary sequences from the MS-CMR images, which provide important label information for the training of deep neural networks.
Automatic and accurate segmentation of the ventricles and myocardium from multi-sequence cardiac MRI (CMR) is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment management for patients suffering from myocardial infarction (MI). However, due to the existence of domain shift among different modalities of datasets, the performance of deep neural networks drops significantly when the training and testing datasets are distinct. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain alignment method to explicitly alleviate the domain shifts among different modalities of CMR sequences, emph{e.g.,} bSSFP, LGE, and T2-weighted. Our segmentation network is attention U-Net with pyramid pooling module, where multi-level feature space and output space adversarial learning are proposed to transfer discriminative domain knowledge across different datasets. Moreover, we further introduce a group-wise feature recalibration module to enforce the fine-grained semantic-level feature alignment that matching features from different networks but with the same class label. We evaluate our method on the multi-sequence cardiac MR Segmentation Challenge 2019 datasets, which contain three different modalities of MRI sequences. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed methods can obtain significant segmentation improvements compared with the baseline models.