Coronary angiography image segmentation based on PSPNet

Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2021 Mar:200:105897. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105897. Epub 2020 Dec 4.

Abstract

Purpose: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is known to have high prevalence, high disability and mortality. The incidence and mortality of cardiovascular disease are also gradually increasing worldwide. Therefore, our paper proposes to use a more efficient image processing method to extract accurate vascular structures from vascular images by combining computer vision and deep learning.

Method: Our proposed segmentation of coronary angiography images based on PSPNet network was compared with FCN, and analyzed and discussed the experimental results using three evaluation indicators of precision, recall and Fl-score. Aiming at the complex and changeable structure of coronary angiography images and over-fitting or parameter structure destruction, we implemented the parallel multi-scale convolutional neural network model using PSPNet, using small sample transfer learning that limits parameter learning method.

Results: The accuracy of our technique proposed in this paper is 0.957. The accuracy of PSPNet is 26.75% higher than the traditional algorithm and 4.59% higher than U-Net. The average segmentation accuracy of the PSPNet model using transfer learning on the test set increased from 0.926 to 0.936, the sensitivity increased from 0.846 to 0.865, and the specificity increased from 0.921 to 0.949. The segmentation effect in this paper is closest to the segmentation result of the human expert, and is smoother than that of U-Net segmentation.

Conclusion: The PSPNet network reduces manual interaction in diagnosis, reduces dependence on medical personnel, improves the efficiency of disease diagnosis, and provides auxiliary strategies for subsequent medical diagnosis systems based on cardiac coronary angiography.

Keywords: Coronary angiography images; blood vessel segmentation; deep learning; multi-scale convolutional neural network; transfer learning.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Coronary Angiography
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*