2024/10/17 by Kamil Kwarciak, Kwarciak, Kamil, Mateusz Danioł +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · Medicine · #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Medical Image Segmentation Techniques #Medical Imaging and Analysis #Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.13427
openalex publication_date 2024/10/17 · openalex created_date 2024/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The skull segmentation from CT scans can be seen as an already solved problem. However, in MR this task has a significantly greater complexity due to the presence of soft tissues rather than bones. Capturing the bone structures from MR images of the head, where the main visualization objective is the brain, is very demanding. The attempts that make use of skull stripping seem to not be well suited for this task and fail to work in many cases. On the other hand, supervised approaches require costly and time-consuming skull annotations. To overcome the difficulties we propose a fully unsupervised approach, where we do not perform the segmentation directly on MR images, but we rather perform a synthetic CT data generation via MR-to-CT translation and perform the segmentation there. We address many issues associated with unsupervised skull segmentation including the unpaired nature of MR and CT datasets (contrastive learning), low resolution and poor quality (super-resolution), and generalization capabilities. The research has a significant value for downstream tasks requiring skull segmentation from MR volumes such as craniectomy or surgery planning and can be seen as an important step towards the utilization of synthetic data in medical imaging.