DSCA: A Digital Subtraction Angiography Sequence Dataset and Spatio-Temporal Model for Cerebral Artery Segmentation
This work addresses cerebrovascular disease diagnosis for physicians by providing a publicly available dataset and improved segmentation model, though it is incremental as it builds on existing DSA segmentation approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of segmenting cerebral arteries in Digital Subtraction Angiography sequences, which is challenging due to low contrast and ambiguity with skull structures, and introduces a new dataset (DSCA) and a spatio-temporal model (DSANet) that achieves a Dice score of 0.9033, outperforming existing methods.
Cerebrovascular diseases (CVDs) remain a leading cause of global disability and mortality. Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) sequences, recognized as the gold standard for diagnosing CVDs, can clearly visualize the dynamic flow and reveal pathological conditions within the cerebrovasculature. Therefore, precise segmentation of cerebral arteries (CAs) and classification between their main trunks and branches are crucial for physicians to accurately quantify diseases. However, achieving accurate CA segmentation in DSA sequences remains a challenging task due to small vessels with low contrast, and ambiguity between vessels and residual skull structures. Moreover, the lack of publicly available datasets limits exploration in the field. In this paper, we introduce a DSA Sequence-based Cerebral Artery segmentation dataset (DSCA), the publicly accessible dataset designed specifically for pixel-level semantic segmentation of CAs. Additionally, we propose DSANet, a spatio-temporal network for CA segmentation in DSA sequences. Unlike existing DSA segmentation methods that focus only on a single frame, the proposed DSANet introduces a separate temporal encoding branch to capture dynamic vessel details across multiple frames. To enhance small vessel segmentation and improve vessel connectivity, we design a novel TemporalFormer module to capture global context and correlations among sequential frames. Furthermore, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Fusion (STF) module to effectively integrate spatial and temporal features from the encoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSANet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in CA segmentation, achieving a Dice of 0.9033.