Segmenting Bi-Atrial Structures Using ResNext Based Framework
This addresses the need for accurate, reproducible bi-atrial segmentation to guide ablation strategies in clinical AF management, representing a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The paper tackled the problem of automating segmentation of left and right atria from 3D LGE-MRI for atrial fibrillation management, proposing TASSNet, which achieved high accuracy on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets without additional training.
Atrial Fibrillation (AF), the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia worldwide, increasingly requires accurate bi-atrial structural assessment to guide ablation strategies, particularly in persistent AF. Late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) enables visualisation of atrial fibrosis, but precise manual segmentation remains time-consuming, operator-dependent, and prone to variability. We propose TASSNet, a novel two-stage deep learning framework for fully automated segmentation of both left atrium (LA) and right atrium (RA), including atrial walls and cavities, from 3D LGE-MRI. TASSNet introduces two main innovations: (i) a ResNeXt-based encoder to enhance feature extraction from limited medical datasets, and (ii) a cyclical learning rate schedule to address convergence instability in highly imbalanced, small-batch 3D segmentation tasks. We evaluated our method on two datasets, one of which was completely out-of-distribution, without any additional training. In both cases, TASSNet successfully segmented atrial structures with high accuracy. These results highlight TASSNet's potential for robust and reproducible bi-atrial segmentation, enabling advanced fibrosis quantification and personalised ablation planning in clinical AF management.