2023/05/26 by Peidi Xu, Xu, Peidi, Olga Sosnovtseva +7
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Medical Image Segmentation Techniques #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.17054
openalex publication_date 2023/05/26 · openalex created_date 2023/05/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Accurate analysis and modeling of renal functions require a precise segmentation of the renal blood vessels. Micro-CT scans provide image data at higher resolutions, making more small vessels near the renal cortex visible. Although deep-learning-based methods have shown state-of-the-art performance in automatic blood vessel segmentations, they require a large amount of labeled training data. However, voxel-wise labeling in micro-CT scans is extremely time-consuming given the huge volume sizes. To mitigate the problem, we simulate synthetic renal vascular trees physiologically while generating corresponding scans of the simulated trees by training a generative model on unlabeled scans. This enables the generative model to learn the mapping implicitly without the need for explicit functions to emulate the image acquisition process. We further propose an additional segmentation branch over the generative model trained on the generated scans. We demonstrate that the model can directly segment blood vessels on real scans and validate our method on both 3D micro-CT scans of rat kidneys and a proof-of-concept experiment on 2D retinal images. Code and 3D results are available at https://github.com/miccai2023anony/RenalVesselSeg