Title
FCNN-based axon segmentation for convection-enhanced delivery optimization.
Abstract
Glioblastoma multiforme treatment is a challenging task in clinical oncology. Convection- enhanced delivery (CED) is showing encouraging but still suboptimal results due to drug leakages. Numerical models can predict drug distribution within the brain, but require retrieving brain physical properties, such as the axon diameter distribution (ADD), through axon architecture analysis. The goal of this work was to provide an automatic, accurate and fast method for axon segmentation in electronic microscopy images based on fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) as to allow automatic ADD computation. The segmentation was performed using a residual FCNN inspired by U-Net and Resnet. The FCNN training was performed exploiting mini-batch gradient descent and the Adam optimizer. The Dice coefficient was chosen as loss function. The proposed segmentation method achieved results comparable with already existing methods for axon segmentation in terms of Information Theoretic Scoring ( $$0.98\%$$ ) with a faster training (5 h on the deployed GPU) and without requiring heavy post-processing (testing time was 0.2 s with a non-optimized code). The ADDs computed from the segmented and ground-truth images were statistically equivalent. The algorithm proposed in this work allowed fast and accurate axon segmentation and ADD computation, showing promising performance for brain microstructure analysis for CED delivery optimization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s11548-018-01911-z
International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery
Keywords
Field
DocType
Axon segmentation, Electron microscopy, Deep learning, Convection-enhanced delivery, Glioblastoma
Computer vision,Numerical models,Glioblastoma,Convolutional neural network,Segmentation,Convection-Enhanced Delivery,Axon,Artificial intelligence,Deep learning,Medicine,Computation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
14
3
1861-6410
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
14
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Vidotto100.34
Elena De Momi224252.77
Michele Gazzara300.34
Leonardo S. Mattos412328.31
Giancarlo Ferrigno530546.56
Sara Moccia6389.44