Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Segmentation Using Convolutional Neural Networks Trained with Images Generated
Data: 12.10.2019
Abstract
An abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a ballooning of the abdominal aorta, that if not treated tends to grow and rupture. Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) is the main imaging modality for the management of AAAs, and segmenting them is essential for AAA rupture risk and disease progression assessment. Previous works have shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can accurately segment AAAs, but have the limitation of requiring large amounts of annotated data to train the networks. Thus, in this work we propose a methodology to train a CNN only with images generated with a synthetic shape model, and test its generalization and ability to segment AAAs from new original CTA scans. The synthetic images are created from realistic deformations generated by applying principal component analysis to the deformation fields obtained from the registration of few datasets. The results show that the performance of a CNN trained with synthetic data to segment AAAs from new scans is comparable to the one of a network trained with real images. This suggests that the proposed methodology may be applied to generate images and train a CNN to segment other types of aneurysms, reducing the burden of obtaining large annotated image databases.
BIB_text
title = {Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Segmentation Using Convolutional Neural Networks Trained with Images Generated },
keywds = {
Abdominal aortic aneurysm; Segmentation; Convolutional Neural Network; Synthetic images; Principal component analysis
}
abstract = {
An abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a ballooning of the abdominal aorta, that if not treated tends to grow and rupture. Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) is the main imaging modality for the management of AAAs, and segmenting them is essential for AAA rupture risk and disease progression assessment. Previous works have shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can accurately segment AAAs, but have the limitation of requiring large amounts of annotated data to train the networks. Thus, in this work we propose a methodology to train a CNN only with images generated with a synthetic shape model, and test its generalization and ability to segment AAAs from new original CTA scans. The synthetic images are created from realistic deformations generated by applying principal component analysis to the deformation fields obtained from the registration of few datasets. The results show that the performance of a CNN trained with synthetic data to segment AAAs from new scans is comparable to the one of a network trained with real images. This suggests that the proposed methodology may be applied to generate images and train a CNN to segment other types of aneurysms, reducing the burden of obtaining large annotated image databases.
}
isbn = {978-3-030-33326-3},
date = {2019-10-12},
}
