Learning Topology-Aware Implicit Field for Unified Pulmonary Tree Modeling with Incomplete Topological Supervision
This addresses a domain-specific problem for medical imaging and clinical applications, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods by enhancing efficiency and robustness.
The paper tackles the problem of incomplete pulmonary trees in CT images, which degrade anatomical analysis, by proposing TopoField, a topology-aware implicit modeling framework that repairs topological incompleteness and achieves accurate anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction in just over one second per case.
Pulmonary trees extracted from CT images frequently exhibit topological incompleteness, such as missing or disconnected branches, which substantially degrades downstream anatomical analysis and limits the applicability of existing pulmonary tree modeling pipelines. Current approaches typically rely on dense volumetric processing or explicit graph reasoning, leading to limited efficiency and reduced robustness under realistic structural corruption. We propose TopoField, a topology-aware implicit modeling framework that treats topology repair as a first-class modeling problem and enables unified multi-task inference for pulmonary tree analysis. TopoField represents pulmonary anatomy using sparse surface and skeleton point clouds and learns a continuous implicit field that supports topology repair without relying on complete or explicit disconnection annotations, by training on synthetically introduced structural disruptions over \textit{already} incomplete trees. Building upon the repaired implicit representation, anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction are jointly inferred through task-specific implicit functions within a single forward pass.Extensive experiments on the Lung3D+ dataset demonstrate that TopoField consistently improves topological completeness and achieves accurate anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction under challenging incomplete scenarios. Owing to its implicit formulation, TopoField attains high computational efficiency, completing all tasks in just over one second per case, highlighting its practicality for large-scale and time-sensitive clinical applications. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/HINTLab/TopoField.