ADSeg: A flap-attention-based deep learning approach for aortic dissection segmentation

作者：Dongqiao Xiang, Jiyang Qi, Yiqing Wen, Hui Zhao, Hui Zhao, Xiaolin Zhang, Qin Jia, Xiaomeng Ma, Yaguang Ren, Hongyao Hu, Wenyu Liu, Fan Yang, Huangxuan Zhao, Huangxuan Zhao, Xinggang Wang, Chuansheng Zheng · 发表于：Patterns · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1016/j.patter.2023.100727 · 被引用次数：19 · 研究领域：Aortic Disease and Treatment Approaches、Aortic aneurysm repair treatments、Cardiac Valve Diseases and Treatments

Accurate and rapid segmentation of the lumen in an aortic dissection (AD) is an important prerequisite for risk evaluation and medical planning for patients with this serious condition. Although some recent studies have pioneered technical advances for the challenging AD segmentation task, they generally neglect the intimal flap structure that separates the true and false lumens. Identification and segmentation of the intimal flap may simplify AD segmentation, and the incorporation of long-distance z axis information interaction along the curved aorta may improve segmentation accuracy. This study proposes a flap attention module that focuses on key flap voxels and performs operations with long-distance attention. In addition, a pragmatic cascaded network structure with feature reuse and a two-step training strategy are presented to fully exploit network representation power. The proposed ADSeg method was evaluated on a multicenter dataset of 108 cases, with or without thrombus; ADSeg outperformed previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin and was robust against center variation.