Amine Sadikine

Amine Sadikine, Bogdan Badic, Jean-Pierre Tasu et al.

The extraction of blood vessels has recently experienced a widespread interest in medical image analysis. Automatic vessel segmentation is highly desirable to guide clinicians in computer-assisted diagnosis, therapy or surgical planning. Despite a good ability to extract large anatomical structures, the capacity of U-Net inspired architectures to automatically delineate vascular systems remains a major issue, especially given the scarcity of existing datasets. In this paper, we present a novel approach that integrates into deep segmentation shape priors from a Semi-Overcomplete Convolutional Auto-Encoder (S-OCAE) embedding. Compared to standard Convolutional Auto-Encoders (CAE), it exploits an over-complete branch that projects data onto higher dimensions to better characterize tiny structures. Experiments on retinal and liver vessel extraction, respectively performed on publicly-available DRIVE and 3D-IRCADb datasets, highlight the effectiveness of our method compared to U-Net trained without and with shape priors from a traditional CAE.

Amine Sadikine, Bogdan Badic, Jean-Pierre Tasu et al.

Extracting hepatic vessels from abdominal images is of high interest for clinicians since it allows to divide the liver into functionally-independent Couinaud segments. In this respect, an automated liver blood vessel extraction is widely summoned. Despite the significant growth in performance of semantic segmentation methodologies, preserving the complex multi-scale geometry of main vessels and ramifications remains a major challenge. This paper provides a new deep supervised approach for vessel segmentation, with a strong focus on representations arising from the different scales inherent to the vascular tree geometry. In particular, we propose a new clustering technique to decompose the tree into various scale levels, from tiny to large vessels. Then, we extend standard 3D UNet to multi-task learning by incorporating scale-specific auxiliary tasks and contrastive learning to encourage the discrimination between scales in the shared representation. Promising results, depicted in several evaluation metrics, are revealed on the public 3D-IRCADb dataset.

Amine Sadikine, Bogdan Badic, Enzo Ferrante et al.

The precise delineation of blood vessels in medical images is critical for many clinical applications, including pathology detection and surgical planning. However, fully-automated vascular segmentation is challenging because of the variability in shape, size, and topology. Manual segmentation remains the gold standard but is time-consuming, subjective, and impractical for large-scale studies. Hence, there is a need for automatic and reliable segmentation methods that can accurately detect blood vessels from medical images. The integration of shape and topological priors into vessel segmentation models has been shown to improve segmentation accuracy by offering contextual information about the shape of the blood vessels and their spatial relationships within the vascular tree. To further improve anatomical consistency, we propose a new joint prior encoding mechanism which incorporates both shape and topology in a single latent space. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on the publicly available 3D-IRCADb dataset. More globally, the proposed approach holds promise in overcoming the challenges associated with automatic vessel delineation and has the potential to advance the field of deep priors encoding.