Taichi Kin

Xi Yang, Ding Xia, Taichi Kin et al.

Medicine is an important application area for deep learning models. Research in this field is a combination of medical expertise and data science knowledge. In this paper, instead of 2D medical images, we introduce an open-access 3D intracranial aneurysm dataset, IntrA, that makes the application of points-based and mesh-based classification and segmentation models available. Our dataset can be used to diagnose intracranial aneurysms and to extract the neck for a clipping operation in medicine and other areas of deep learning, such as normal estimation and surface reconstruction. We provide a large-scale benchmark of classification and part segmentation by testing state-of-the-art networks. We also discuss the performance of each method and demonstrate the challenges of our dataset. The published dataset can be accessed here: https://github.com/intra3d2019/IntrA.

Heng Fang, Xi Yang, Taichi Kin et al.

Whole-brain surface extraction is an essential topic in medical imaging systems as it provides neurosurgeons with a broader view of surgical planning and abnormality detection. To solve the problem confronted in current deep learning skull stripping methods lacking prior shape information, we propose a new network architecture that incorporates knowledge of signed distance fields and introduce an additional Laplacian loss to ensure that the prediction results retain shape information. We validated our newly proposed method by conducting experiments on our brain magnetic resonance imaging dataset (111 patients). The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable dice scores and also reduces the Hausdorff distance and average symmetric surface distance, thus producing more stable and smooth brain isosurfaces.

Xi Yang, Ding Xia, Taichi Kin et al.

The exact shape of intracranial aneurysms is critical in medical diagnosis and surgical planning. While voxel-based deep learning frameworks have been proposed for this segmentation task, their performance remains limited. In this study, we offer a two-step surface-based deep learning pipeline that achieves significantly higher performance. Our proposed model takes a surface model of entire principal brain arteries containing aneurysms as input and returns aneurysms surfaces as output. A user first generates a surface model by manually specifying multiple thresholds for time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography images. The system then samples small surface fragments from the entire brain arteries and classifies the surface fragments according to whether aneurysms are present using a point-based deep learning network (PointNet++). Finally, the system applies surface segmentation (SO-Net) to surface fragments containing aneurysms. We conduct a direct comparison of segmentation performance by counting voxels between the proposed surface-based framework and the existing voxel-based method, in which our framework achieves a much higher dice similarity coefficient score (72%) than the prior approach (46%).