DBCU-Net: deep learning approach for segmentation of coronary angiography images.

Journal: The international journal of cardiovascular imaging
Published Date:

Abstract

Coronary angiography (CAG) is the "gold standard" for diagnosing coronary artery disease (CAD). However, due to the limitation of current imaging methods, the CAG image has low resolution and poor contrast with a lot of artifacts and noise, which makes it difficult for blood vessels segmentation. In this paper, we propose a DBCU-Net for automatic segmentation of CAG images, which is an extension of U-Net, DenseNet with bi-directional ConvLSTM(BConvLSTM). The main contribution of our network is that instead of convolution in the feature extraction of U-Net, we incorporate dense connectivity and the bi-directional ConvLSTM to highlight salient features. We conduct our experiment on our private dataset, and achieve average Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1-score for coronary artery segmentation of 0.985, 0.913, 0.847 and 0.879 respectively.

Authors

  • Yuqiang Shen
    The Fourth Affiliated Hospital Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Jinhua, China.
  • Zhe Chen
    Evidence-based Medicine Center, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin, China.
  • Jijun Tong
    Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China.
  • Nan Jiang
  • Yun Ning
    School of Information Science and Technology, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China.