Automated peripancreatic vessel segmentation and labeling based on iterative trunk growth and weakly supervised mechanism

Abstract

Peripancreatic vessel segmentation and anatomical labeling are pivotal aspects in aiding surgical planning and prognosis for patients with pancreatic tumors. Nevertheless, prevailing techniques often fall short in achieving satisfactory segmentation performance for the peripancreatic vein (PPV), leading to predictions characterized by poor integrity and connectivity. Besides, unsupervised labeling algorithms usually cannot deal with complex anatomical variation while fully supervised methods require a large number of voxel-wise annotations for training, which is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address these two problems, we propose an Automated Peripancreatic vEssel Segmentation and lAbeling (APESA) framework, to not only highly improve the segmentation performance for PPV, but also efficiently identify the peripancreatic artery (PPA) branches. There are two core modules in our proposed APESA framework: iterative trunk growth module (ITGM) for vein segmentation and weakly supervised labeling mechanism (WSLM) for artery labeling. The ITGM is composed of a series of iterative submodules, each of which chooses the largest connected component of the previous PPV segmentation as the trunk of a tree structure, seeks for the potential missing branches around the trunk by our designed branch proposal network, and facilitates trunk growth under the connectivity constraint. The WSLM incorporates the rule-based pseudo label generation with less expert participation, an anatomical labeling network to learn the branch distribution voxel by voxel, and adaptive radius-based postprocessing to refine the branch structures of the labeling predictions. Our achieved Dice of 94.01% for PPV segmentation on our collected dataset represents an approximately 10% accuracy improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we attained a Dice of 97.01% for PPA segmentation and competitive labeling performance for PPA labeling compared to prior works. Our source codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/ZouLiwen-1999/APESA.