Extremely Weakly-Supervised Blood Vessel Segmentation with Physiologically Based Synthesis and Domain Adaptation

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Accurate analysis and modeling of renal functions require a precise segmentation of the renal blood vessels. Micro-CT scans provide image data at higher resolutions, making deeper vessels near the renal cortex visible. Although deep-learning-based methods have shown state-of-the-art performance in automatic blood vessel segmentations, they require a large amount of labeled training data. However, voxel-wise labeling in micro-CT scans is extremely time-consuming, given the huge volume sizes. To mitigate the problem, we simulate synthetic renal vascular trees physiologically while generating corresponding scans of the simulated trees by training a generative model on unlabeled scans. This enables the generative model to learn the mapping implicitly without the need for explicit functions to emulate the image acquisition process. We further propose an additional segmentation branch over the generative model trained on the generated scans. We demonstrate that the model can directly segment blood vessels on real scans and validate our method on both 3D micro-CT scans of rat kidneys and a proof-of-concept experiment on 2D retinal images. Code and 3D results are available at (https://github.com/diku-dk/RenalVesselSeg ).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Learning with Limited and Noisy Data - 2nd International Workshop, MILLanD 2023, Held in Conjunction with MICCAI 2023, Proceedings
EditorsZhiyun Xue, Sameer Antani, Ghada Zamzmi, Feng Yang, Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman, Zhaohui Liang, Sharon Xiaolei Huang, Marius George Linguraru
PublisherSpringer
Publication date2023
Pages191-201
ISBN (Print)9783031471964
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event2nd Workshop on Medical Image Learning with Noisy and Limited Data, MILLanD 2023 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: 8 Oct 20238 Oct 2023

Conference

Conference2nd Workshop on Medical Image Learning with Noisy and Limited Data, MILLanD 2023
LandCanada
ByVancouver
Periode08/10/202308/10/2023
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14307 LNCS
ISSN0302-9743

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

    Research areas

  • Blood vessel, Domain adaptation, Generative model, Physiological simulation, Renal vasculature, Semantic segmentation

ID: 371611843