Yangyang Ge

Jianning Li, Long Cao, Yangyang Ge et al.

Type B Aortic Dissection(TBAD) is a rare aortic disease with a high 5-year mortality.Personalized and precise management of TBAD has been increasingly desired in clinic which requires the geometric parameters of TBAD specific to the patient be measured accurately.This remains to be a challenging task for vascular surgeons as manual measurement is highly subjective and imprecise. To solve this problem,we introduce STENT-a STandard cta database with annotation of the ENtire aorta and True-false lumen. The database contains 274 CT angiography (CTA) scans from 274 unique TBAD patients and is split into a training set(254 cases including 210 preoperative and 44 postoperative scans ) and a test set(20 cases).Based on STENT,we develop a series of methods including automated TBAD segmentation and automated measurement of TBAD parameters that facilitate personalized and precise management of the disease. In this work, the database and the proposed methods are thoroughly introduced and evaluated and the results of our study shows the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach to easing the decision-making process for vascular surgeons during personalized TBAD management.

Jianning Li, Long Cao, Yangyang Ge et al.

Segmentation of the entire aorta and true-false lumen is crucial to inform plan and follow-up for endovascular repair of the rare yet life threatening type B aortic dissection. Manual segmentation by slice is time-consuming and requires expertise, while current computer-aided methods focus on the segmentation of the entire aorta, are unable to concurrently segment true-false lumen, and some require human interaction. We here report a fully automated approach based on a 3-D multi-task deep convolutional neural network that segments the entire aorta and true-false lumen from CTA images in a unified framework. For training, we built a database containing 254 CTA images (210 preoperative and 44 postoperative) obtained using various systems from 254 unique patients with type B aortic dissection. Slice-wise manual segmentation of the entire aorta and the true-false lumen for each 3-D CTA image was provided. Upon evaluation of another 16 CTA images (11 preoperative and 5 postoperative) with ground truth segmentation provided by experienced vascular surgeons, our method achieves a mean dice similarity score(DSC) of 0.910,0.849 and 0.821 for the entire aorta,true lumen and false lumen respectively.