Semi-Siamese U-Net for separation of lung and heart bioimpedance images: A simulation study of thorax EIT

PLoS One. 2021 Feb 2;16(2):e0246071. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246071. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is widely used for bedside monitoring of lung ventilation status. Its goal is to reflect the internal conductivity changes and estimate the electrical properties of the tissues in the thorax. However, poor spatial resolution affects EIT image reconstruction to the extent that the heart and lung-related impedance images are barely distinguishable. Several studies have attempted to tackle this problem, and approaches based on decomposition of EIT images using linear transformations have been developed, and recently, U-Net has become a prominent architecture for semantic segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-Siamese U-Net specifically tailored for EIT application. It is based on the state-of-the-art U-Net, whose structure is modified and extended, forming shared encoder with parallel decoders and has multi-task weighted losses added to adapt to the individual separation tasks. The trained semi-Siamese U-Net model was evaluated with a test dataset, and the results were compared with those of the classical U-Net in terms of Dice similarity coefficient and mean absolute error. Results showed that compared with the classical U-Net, semi-Siamese U-Net exhibited performance improvements of 11.37% and 3.2% in Dice similarity coefficient, and 3.16% and 5.54% in mean absolute error, in terms of heart and lung-impedance image separation, respectively.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Electric Impedance
  • Heart / diagnostic imaging*
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Lung / diagnostic imaging*
  • Machine Learning
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Radiography, Thoracic*
  • Tomography*

Associated data

  • Dryad/10.5061/dryad.47d7wm3c3

Grants and funding

All funding from research grant 109-2221-E-006 -073 -MY2, 108-2221-E-006 -176, 107-2221-E-006 -047, and 106-2221-E-006 -045 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (http://www.most.gov.tw) is gratefully acknowledged. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study.