Dual U-Net-Based Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Blood Vessel Segmentation with Reduced Cerebral MR Training Volumes

Abstract

Segmenting vessels in brain images is a critical step for many medical interventions and diagnoses of illnesses. Recent advances in artificial intelligence provide better models, achieving a human-like level of expertise in many tasks. In this paper, we present a new approach to segment Time-of-Flight Magnetic Resonance Angiography (TOF-MRA) images, relying on fewer training samples than state-of-the-art methods. We propose a conditional generative adversarial network with an adapted generator based on a concatenated U-Net with a residual U-Net architecture (UUr-cGAN) to carry out blood vessel segmentation in TOF-MRA images, relying on data augmentation to diminish the drawback of having few volumes at disposal for training the model, while preventing overfitting by using regularization techniques. The proposed model achieves 89.52% precision and 87.23% in Dice score on average from the cross-validated experiment for brain blood vessel segmentation tasks, which is similar to other state-of-the-art methods while using considerably fewer training samples. UUr-cGAN extracts important features from small datasets while preventing overfitting compared to other CNN-based methods and still achieve a relatively good performance in image segmentation tasks such as brain blood vessels from TOF-MRA.

Keywords

• brain blood vessels segmentation
• conditional generative adversarial network
• MRI segmentation
• residual U-Net
• time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography