Weijin Xu

Wentao Liu, Tong Tian, Lemeng Wang et al.

The automated segmentation of Intracranial Arteries (IA) in Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) plays a crucial role in the quantification of vascular morphology, significantly contributing to computer-assisted stroke research and clinical practice. Current research primarily focuses on the segmentation of single-frame DSA using proprietary datasets. However, these methods face challenges due to the inherent limitation of single-frame DSA, which only partially displays vascular contrast, thereby hindering accurate vascular structure representation. In this work, we introduce DIAS, a dataset specifically developed for IA segmentation in DSA sequences. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating DIAS, covering full, weak, and semi-supervised segmentation methods. Specifically, we propose the vessel sequence segmentation network, in which the sequence feature extraction module effectively captures spatiotemporal representations of intravascular contrast, achieving intracranial artery segmentation in 2D+Time DSA sequences. For weakly-supervised IA segmentation, we propose a novel scribble learning-based image segmentation framework, which, under the guidance of scribble labels, employs cross pseudo-supervision and consistency regularization to improve the performance of the segmentation network. Furthermore, we introduce the random patch-based self-training framework, aimed at alleviating the performance constraints encountered in IA segmentation due to the limited availability of annotated DSA data. Our extensive experiments on the DIAS dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods as potential baselines for future research and clinical applications. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11396520 and https://github.com/lseventeen/DIAS.

Wentao Liu, Tong Tian, Weijin Xu et al.

The success of Transformer in computer vision has attracted increasing attention in the medical imaging community. Especially for medical image segmentation, many excellent hybrid architectures based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer have been presented and achieve impressive performance. However, most of these methods, which embed modular Transformer into CNNs, struggle to reach their full potential. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid architecture for medical image segmentation called PHTrans, which parallelly hybridizes Transformer and CNN in main building blocks to produce hierarchical representations from global and local features and adaptively aggregate them, aiming to fully exploit their strengths to obtain better segmentation performance. Specifically, PHTrans follows the U-shaped encoder-decoder design and introduces the parallel hybird module in deep stages, where convolution blocks and the modified 3D Swin Transformer learn local features and global dependencies separately, then a sequence-to-volume operation unifies the dimensions of the outputs to achieve feature aggregation. Extensive experimental results on both Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault and Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challeng datasets corroborate its effectiveness, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/lseventeen/PHTrans.

Wentao Liu, Weijin Xu, Songlin Yan et al.

Abdominal organ segmentation has many important clinical applications, such as organ quantification, surgical planning, and disease diagnosis. However, manually annotating organs from CT scans is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Semi-supervised learning has shown the potential to alleviate this challenge by learning from a large set of unlabeled images and limited labeled samples. In this work, we follow the self-training strategy and employ a high-performance hybrid architecture (PHTrans) consisting of CNN and Swin Transformer for the teacher model to generate precise pseudo labels for unlabeled data. Afterward, we introduce them with labeled data together into a two-stage segmentation framework with lightweight PHTrans for training to improve the performance and generalization ability of the model while remaining efficient. Experiments on the validation set of FLARE2022 demonstrate that our method achieves excellent segmentation performance as well as fast and low-resource model inference. The average DSC and NSD are 0.8956 and 0.9316, respectively. Under our development environments, the average inference time is 18.62 s, the average maximum GPU memory is 1995.04 MB, and the area under the GPU memory-time curve and the average area under the CPU utilization-time curve are 23196.84 and 319.67. The code is available at https://github.com/lseventeen/FLARE22-TwoStagePHTrans.

Wentao Liu, Tong Tian, Weijin Xu et al.

Abdominal organ and tumour segmentation has many important clinical applications, such as organ quantification, surgical planning, and disease diagnosis. However, manual assessment is inherently subjective with considerable inter- and intra-expert variability. In the paper, we propose a hybrid supervised framework, StMt, that integrates self-training and mean teacher for the segmentation of abdominal organs and tumors using partially labeled and unlabeled data. We introduce a two-stage segmentation pipeline and whole-volume-based input strategy to maximize segmentation accuracy while meeting the requirements of inference time and GPU memory usage. Experiments on the validation set of FLARE2023 demonstrate that our method achieves excellent segmentation performance as well as fast and low-resource model inference. Our method achieved an average DSC score of 89.79\% and 45.55 \% for the organs and lesions on the validation set and the average running time and area under GPU memory-time cure are 11.25s and 9627.82MB, respectively.

Lemeng Wang, Wentao Liu, Weijin Xu et al.

Cerebrovascular disease is one of the major diseases facing the world today. Automatic segmentation of intracranial artery (IA) in digital subtraction angiography (DSA) sequences is an important step in the diagnosis of vascular related diseases and in guiding neurointerventional procedures. While, a single image can only show part of the IA within the contrast medium according to the imaging principle of DSA technology. Therefore, 2D DSA segmentation methods are unable to capture the complete IA information and treatment of cerebrovascular diseases. We propose A timing sequence image segmentation network with U-shape, called TSI-Net, which incorporates a bi-directional ConvGRU module (BCM) in the encoder. The network incorporates a bi-directional ConvGRU module (BCM) in the encoder, which can input variable-length DSA sequences, retain past and future information, segment them into 2D images. In addition, we introduce a sensitive detail branch (SDB) at the end for supervising fine vessels. Experimented on the DSA sequence dataset DIAS, the method performs significantly better than state-of-the-art networks in recent years. In particular, it achieves a Sen evaluation metric of 0.797, which is a 3% improvement compared to other methods.

Weijin Xu, Zhuang Sha, Huihua Yang et al.

Hemorrhagic Stroke (HS) has a rapid onset and is a serious condition that poses a great health threat. Promptly and accurately delineating the bleeding region and estimating the volume of bleeding in Computer Tomography (CT) images can assist clinicians in treatment planning, leading to improved treatment outcomes for patients. In this paper, a cascaded 3D model is constructed based on UNet to perform a two-stage segmentation of the hemorrhage area in CT images from rough to fine, and the hemorrhage volume is automatically calculated from the segmented area. On a dataset with 341 cases of hemorrhagic stroke CT scans, the proposed model provides high-quality segmentation outcome with higher accuracy (DSC 85.66%) and better computation efficiency (6.2 second per sample) when compared to the traditional Tada formula with respect to hemorrhage volume estimation.

Wentao Liu, Bowen Liang, Weijin Xu et al.

The rigid registration of aortic Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) and Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) can provide 3D anatomical details of the vasculature for the interventional surgical treatment of conditions such as aortic dissection and aortic aneurysms, holding significant value for clinical research. However, the current methods for 2D/3D image registration are dependent on manual annotations or synthetic data, as well as the extraction of landmarks, which is not suitable for cross-modal registration of aortic DSA/CTA. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method, UDCR, for aortic DSA/CTA rigid registration based on deep reinforcement learning. Leveraging the imaging principles and characteristics of DSA and CTA, we have constructed a cross-dimensional registration environment based on spatial transformations. Specifically, we propose an overlap degree calculation reward function that measures the intensity difference between the foreground and background, aimed at assessing the accuracy of registration between segmentation maps and DSA images. This method is highly flexible, allowing for the loading of pre-trained models to perform registration directly or to seek the optimal spatial transformation parameters through online learning. We manually annotated 61 pairs of aortic DSA/CTA for algorithm evaluation. The results indicate that the proposed UDCR achieved a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 2.85 mm in translation and 4.35° in rotation, showing significant potential for clinical applications.