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VCU-Net: a vascular convolutional network with feature splicing for cerebrovascular image segmentation

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Abstract

Cerebrovascular image segmentation is one of the crucial tasks in the field of biomedical image processing. Due to the variable morphology of cerebral blood vessels, the traditional convolutional kernel is weak in perceiving the structure of elongated blood vessels in the brain, and it is easy to lose the feature information of the elongated blood vessels during the network training process. In this paper, a vascular convolutional U-network (VCU-Net) is proposed to address these problems. This network utilizes a new convolution (vascular convolution) instead of the traditional convolution kernel, to extract features of elongated blood vessels in the brain with different morphologies and orientations by adaptive convolution. In the network encoding stage, a new feature splicing method is used to combine the feature tensor obtained through vascular convolution with the original tensor to provide richer feature information. Experiments show that the DSC and IOU of the proposed method are 53.57% and 69.74%, which are improved by 2.11% and 2.01% over the best performance of the GVC-Net among several typical models. In image visualization, the proposed network has better segmentation performance for complex cerebrovascular structures, especially in dealing with elongated blood vessels in the brain, which shows better integrity and continuity.

Graphical Abstract

We propose a vascular convolutional U-shaped network (VCU-Net). The network utilizes adaptive vascular convolution instead of the traditional convolution kernel to extract features of elongated blood vessels with different morphologies and orientations in the brain. In the encoding stage of the network, a new feature splicing method is used to combine the feature tensor obtained from the vascular convolution with the original tensor to provide richer feature information.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62133014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical & Control Engineering, Shenyang Jianzhu University, Shenyang, China

    Mengxin Li, Fan Lv, Jiaming Chen, Kunyan Zheng & Jingwen Zhao

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  1. Mengxin Li
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Correspondence to Fan Lv.

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Li, M., Lv, F., Chen, J. et al. VCU-Net: a vascular convolutional network with feature splicing for cerebrovascular image segmentation. Med Biol Eng Comput 63, 661–672 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-024-03219-4

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