Coronary artery segmentation in CCTA images based on multi-scale feature learning

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Xu, Bu^a | Yang, Jinzhong^a | Hong, Peng^b | Fan, Xiaoxue^a | Sun, Yu^{a; c} | Zhang, Libo^{a; c} | Yang, Benqiang^{a; c} | Xu, Lisheng^{a; d; e; *} | Avolio, Alberto^f

Affiliations: [a] College of Medicine and Biological Information Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China | [b] Software College, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China | [c] Department of Radiology, General Hospital of North Theater Command, Shenyang, China | [d] Key Laboratory of Medical Image Computing, Ministry of Education, Shenyang, China | [e] Engineering Research Center of Medical Imaging and Intelligent Analysis, Ministry of Education, Shenyang, China | [f] Macquarie Medical School, Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Lisheng Xu. E-mail: xuls@bmie.neu.edu.cn.

Abstract: BACKGROUND:Coronary artery segmentation is a prerequisite in computer-aided diagnosis of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). However, segmentation of coronary arteries in Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA) images faces several challenges. The current segmentation approaches are unable to effectively address these challenges and existing problems such as the need for manual interaction or low segmentation accuracy. OBJECTIVE:A Multi-scale Feature Learning and Rectification (MFLR) network is proposed to tackle the challenges and achieve automatic and accurate segmentation of coronary arteries. METHODS:The MFLR network introduces a multi-scale feature extraction module in the encoder to effectively capture contextual information under different receptive fields. In the decoder, a feature correction and fusion module is proposed, which employs high-level features containing multi-scale information to correct and guide low-level features, achieving fusion between the two-level features to further improve segmentation performance. RESULTS:The MFLR network achieved the best performance on the dice similarity coefficient, Jaccard index, Recall, F1-score, and 95% Hausdorff distance, for both in-house and public datasets. CONCLUSION:Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and good generalization ability of the MFLR approach. This study contributes to the accurate diagnosis and treatment of CAD, and it also informs other segmentation applications in medicine.

Keywords: Coronary artery segmentation, CCTA, multi-scale feature, feature fusion, feature correction

DOI: 10.3233/XST-240093

Journal: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 973-991, 2024