2019/07/04 by Jen-Tang Lu, Lu, Jen-Tang, Rupert Brooks +21 · 1 citation
Engineering · Medicine · #Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging #Aortic aneurysm repair treatments #Cardiac, Anesthesia and Surgical Outcomes #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1907.02567
openalex publication_date 2019/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We propose a deep learning-based technique for detection and quantification of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs). The condition, which leads to more than 10,000 deaths per year in the United States, is asymptomatic, often detected incidentally, and often missed by radiologists. Our model architecture is a modified 3D U-Net combined with ellipse fitting that performs aorta segmentation and AAA detection. The study uses 321 abdominal-pelvic CT examinations performed by Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Radiology for training and validation. The model is then further tested for generalizability on a separate set of 57 examinations with differing patient demographics and acquisition characteristics than the original dataset. DeepAAA achieves high performance on both sets of data (sensitivity/specificity 0.91/0.95 and 0.85 / 1.0 respectively), on contrast and non-contrast CT scans and works with image volumes with varying numbers of images. We find that DeepAAA exceeds literature-reported performance of radiologists on incidental AAA detection. It is expected that the model can serve as an effective background detector in routine CT examinations to prevent incidental AAAs from being missed.