TractoEmbed: Modular Multi-level Embedding framework for white matter tract segmentation
This addresses segmentation challenges in brain connectivity and neurosurgical planning, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing embedding approaches.
The paper tackles white matter tract segmentation by proposing TractoEmbed, a modular multi-level embedding framework that encodes localized representations through hierarchical streamline data, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods across datasets and age groups.
White matter tract segmentation is crucial for studying brain structural connectivity and neurosurgical planning. However, segmentation remains challenging due to issues like class imbalance between major and minor tracts, structural similarity, subject variability, symmetric streamlines between hemispheres etc. To address these challenges, we propose TractoEmbed, a modular multi-level embedding framework, that encodes localized representations through learning tasks in respective encoders. In this paper, TractoEmbed introduces a novel hierarchical streamline data representation that captures maximum spatial information at each level i.e. individual streamlines, clusters, and patches. Experiments show that TractoEmbed outperforms state-of-the-art methods in white matter tract segmentation across different datasets, and spanning various age groups. The modular framework directly allows the integration of additional embeddings in future works.