Geometry-Based End-to-End Segmentation of Coronary Artery in Computed Tomography Angiograph

Abstract

Coronary artery segmentation has great significance in providing morphological information and treatment guidance in clinics. However, the complex structures with tiny and narrow branches of the coronary artery bring it a great challenge. Limited by the low resolution and poor contrast of medical images, voxel-based segmentation methods could potentially lead to fragmentations of segmented vessels and surface voids are commonly found in the reconstructed mesh. Therefore, we propose a geometry-based end-to-end segmentation method for the coronary artery in computed tomography angiography. A U-shaped network is applied to extract image features, which are projected to mesh space, driving the geometry-based network to deform the mesh. Integrating the ability of geometric deformation, the proposed network could output mesh results of the coronary artery directly. Besides, the centerline-based approach is utilized to produce the ground truth of the mesh instead of the traditional marching cube method. Extensive experiments on our collected dataset CCA-520 demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of our method. Quantitatively, our model achieves Dice of 0.779 and HD of 0.299, exceeding other methods in our dataset. Especially, our geometry-based model generates an accurate, intact and smooth mesh of the coronary artery, devoid of any fragmentations of segmented vessels.