Using CNNs for Designing and Implementing an Automatic Vascular Segmentation Method of Biomedical Images

The assessment of vascular complexity in the lower limbs provides important information about peripheral artery diseases, with a relevant impact on both therapeutic decisions and on prognostic estimation. Currently, the evaluation is carried out by visual inspection of cine-angiograms, which is largely operator-dependent. An automatic image analysis could offer a fast and more reliable technique to support physicians with the clinical management of these patients. In this work, we introduce a new method to automatically segment the vascular tree from cine-angiography images, in order to improve the clinical interpretation of the complexity of vascular collaterals in Peripheral Arterial Occlusive Disease (PAOD) patients. The approach is based on: (1) a feature-detection method to convert the video into a static image with lager Field Of View (FOV) and (2) a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the segmentation of vascular structure. Experimental evaluations over a set of clinical cases confirm the viability of the approach: accuracy is assessed in terms of area under the ROC curve, where an average value of 0.988 ± 0.006 is measured.