Generative Consistency for Semi-Supervised Cerebrovascular Segmentation From TOF-MRA

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2023 Feb;42(2):346-353. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2022.3184675. Epub 2023 Feb 2.

Abstract

Cerebrovascular segmentation from Time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (TOF-MRA) is a critical step in computer-aided diagnosis. In recent years, deep learning models have proved its powerful feature extraction for cerebrovascular segmentation. However, they require many labeled datasets to implement effective driving, which are expensive and professional. In this paper, we propose a generative consistency for semi-supervised (GCS) model. Considering the rich information contained in the feature map, the GCS model utilizes the generation results to constrain the segmentation model. The generated data comes from labeled data, unlabeled data, and unlabeled data after perturbation, respectively. The GCS model also calculates the consistency of the perturbed data to improve the feature mining ability. Subsequently, we propose a new model as the backbone of the GSC model. It transfers TOF-MRA into graph space and establishes correlation using Transformer. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model on TOF-MRA representations, and tested the GCS model with state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods using the proposed model as backbone. The experiments prove the important role of the GCS model in cerebrovascular segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/MontaEllis/SSL-For-Medical-Segmentation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted*
  • Magnetic Resonance Angiography*
  • Supervised Machine Learning