Abstract
Congenital heart disease (CHD) encompasses a range of cardiac malformations present from birth, representing the leading congenital diagnosis. 3D volumetric reconstructions of T2w black blood fetal MRI provide optimal vessel visualisation, supporting prenatal CHD diagnosis, a key step for optimal patient management. We present a framework for automated multi-class fetal vessel segmentation in the setting where binary manual labels of the vessels region of interest (ROI) are available for training, as well as a multi-class labelled atlas.
We combine deep learning label propagation from multi-class labelled condition-specific atlases with 3D Attention U-Net segmentation to achieve the desired multi-class output. We train a single network to segment 12 fetal cardiac vessels for three distinct aortic arch anomalies (double aortic arch, right aortic arch, and suspected coarctation of the aorta). Our segmentation network is trained by combination of a multi-class loss, which uses the propagated multi-class labels; and a binary loss which uses binary labels generated by expert clinicians.
Our proposed method outperforms label propagation in accuracy of vessel segmentation, while succeeding in segmenting the anomaly area of all three CHD diagnoses included, achieving a 100% vessel detection rate.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge funding from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Smart Medical Imaging (EP/S022104/1).
We thank everyone who was involved in the acquisition and examination of the datasets and all participating mothers. This work was supported by the Rosetrees Trust [A2725], the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Medical Engineering at King’s College London [WT 203148/Z/16/Z], the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC IEH award [102431] for the iFIND project, the NIHR Clinical Research Facility (CRF) at Guy’s and St Thomas’ and by the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre based at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.
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Ramirez Gilliland, P. et al. (2022). Automated Multi-class Fetal Cardiac Vessel Segmentation in Aortic Arch Anomalies Using T2-Weighted 3D Fetal MRI. In: Licandro, R., Melbourne, A., Abaci Turk, E., Macgowan, C., Hutter, J. (eds) Perinatal, Preterm and Paediatric Image Analysis. PIPPI 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13575. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17117-8_8
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