Generative adversarial network based cerebrovascular segmentation for time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography image

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The accurate segmentation of cerebral vessels from time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (TOF-MRA) data is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of cerebrovascular diseases. However, cerebrovascular segmentation remains challenging due to the tiny and complex structure of the vessels. This paper proposed a GAN-based deep-based method that maps the TOF-MRA data to 3D cerebral vessels. To improve the capability of feature expression, the proposed network integrates squeeze-and-excite blocks into a Vnet structure to extract and accumulate features at different scales. In addition, we introduce adversarial loss for network training, which can help the model to learn the distribution of the cerebral vessels. Besides, we introduce island number and minimum diameter to evaluate the spatial consistency and recognized minimal vessel of the cerebrovascular segmentation results. The proposed method is validated on 102 TOF-MRA cases with manually annotated labels. The experimental results indicate that our method can identify more tiny cerebral vessels meanwhile maintaining the spatial consistency of the cerebral vessel structure. Besides, our GAN-based cerebrovascular segmentation method reaches an average dice similar coefficient of 89.89%, outperforming other state-of-the-art segmentation methods.