Accurate Airway Tree Segmentation in CT Scans via Anatomy-Aware Multi-Class Segmentation and Topology-Guided Iterative Learning

作者：Puyang Wang, Dazhou Guo, Dandan Zheng, Minghui Zhang, Haogang Yu, Xin Sun, Jia Ge, Yun Gu, Le Lü, Xianghua Ye, Dakai Jin · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1109/tmi.2024.3419707 · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Lung Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment、Infrastructure Maintenance and Monitoring、Music and Audio Processing

Intrathoracic airway segmentation in computed tomography is a prerequisite for various respiratory disease analyses such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and lung cancer. Due to the low imaging contrast and noises execrated at peripheral branches, the topological-complexity and the intra-class imbalance of airway tree, it remains challenging for deep learning-based methods to segment the complete airway tree (on extracting deeper branches). Unlike other organs with simpler shapes or topology, the airway's complex tree structure imposes an unbearable burden to generate the "ground truth" label (up to 7 or 3 hours of manual or semi-automatic annotation per case). Most of the existing airway datasets are incompletely labeled/annotated, thus limiting the completeness of computer-segmented airway. In this paper, we propose a new anatomy-aware multi-class airway segmentation method enhanced by topology-guided iterative self-learning. Based on the natural airway anatomy, we formulate a simple yet highly effective anatomy-aware multi-class segmentation task to intuitively handle the severe intra-class imbalance of the airway. To solve the incomplete labeling issue, we propose a tailored iterative self-learning scheme to segment toward the complete airway tree. For generating pseudo-labels to achieve higher sensitivity (while retaining similar specificity), we introduce a novel breakage attention map and design a topology-guided pseudo-label refinement method by iterat...