Capsule networks for segmentation of small intravascular ultrasound image datasets.

Journal: International journal of computer assisted radiology and surgery
PMID:

Abstract

PURPOSE: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging is crucial for planning and performing percutaneous coronary interventions. Automatic segmentation of lumen and vessel wall in IVUS images can thus help streamlining the clinical workflow. State-of-the-art results in image segmentation are achieved with data-driven methods like convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These need large amounts of training data to perform sufficiently well but medical image datasets are often rather small. A possibility to overcome this problem is exploiting alternative network architectures like capsule networks.

Authors

  • Lennart Bargsten
  • Silas Raschka
    Hamburg University of Technology, Institute of Medical Technology and Intelligent Systems, Hamburg, Germany.
  • Alexander Schlaefer
    Institute of Medical Technology, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany. schlaefer@tuhh.de.