Title
Joint segmentation of lumen and outer wall from femoral artery MR images: Towards 3D imaging measurements of peripheral arterial disease
Abstract
Three-dimensional (3D) measurements of peripheral arterial disease (PAD) plaque burden extracted from fast black-blood magnetic resonance (MR) images have shown to be more predictive of clinical outcomes than PAD stenosis measurements. To this end, accurate segmentation of the femoral artery lumen and outer wall is required for generating volumetric measurements of PAD plaque burden. Here, we propose a semi-automated algorithm to jointly segment the femoral artery lumen and outer wall surfaces from 3D black-blood MR images, which are reoriented and reconstructed along the medial axis of the femoral artery to obtain improved spatial coherence between slices of the long, thin femoral artery and to reduce computation time. The developed segmentation algorithm enforces two priors in a global optimization manner the spatial consistency between the adjacent 2D slices and the anatomical region order between the femoral artery lumen and outer wall surfaces. The formulated combinatorial optimization problem for segmentation is solved globally and exactly by means of convex relaxation using a coupled continuous max-flow (CCMF) model, which is a dual formulation to the convex relaxed optimization problem. In addition, the CCMF model directly derives an efficient duality-based algorithm based on the modern multiplier augmented optimization scheme, which has been implemented on a GPU for fast computation. The computed segmentations from the developed algorithm were compared to manual delineations from experts using 20 black-blood MR images. The developed algorithm yielded both high accuracy (Dice similarity coefficients >= 87% for both the lumen and outer wall surfaces) and high reproducibility (intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.95 for generating vessel wall area), while outperforming the state-of-the-art method in terms of computational time by a factor of approximate to 20. (C)2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.media.2015.08.004
Medical Image Analysis
Keywords
Field
DocType
Peripheral arterial disease,Multi-region segmentation,Convex relaxation,Coupled continuous max-flow,Spatial-consistency prior
Computer vision,Global optimization,Segmentation,Medial axis,Femoral artery,Lumen (unit),Duality (optimization),Artificial intelligence,Optimization problem,Mathematics,Computation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
26
1
1361-8415
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.40
23
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Eranga Ukwatta115418.10
Jing Yuan237223.02
Wu Qiu320318.54
Martin Rajchl442134.67
Bernard Chiu53111.00
Aaron Fenster627067.27