Lai Pei-Yu, Chang Chung-Hsing, Su Hong-Ren, Kuo Wen-Chuan
Department of Biophotonics, National Yang-Ming University, 155, Sec-2, Li-Nong Street, Taipei 112, Taiwan.
Skin Institute, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, Hualien, Taiwan.
Biomed Opt Express. 2020 Apr 23;11(5):2679-2693. doi: 10.1364/BOE.389373. eCollection 2020 May 1.
The lymphatic system branches throughout the body to transport bodily fluid and plays a key immune-response role. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging technique for the noninvasive and label-free imaging of lymphatic capillaries utilizing low scattering features of the lymph fluid. Here, the proposed lymphatic segmentation method combines U-Net-based CNN, a Hessian vesselness filter, and a modified intensity-thresholding to search the nearby pixels based on the binarized Hessian mask. Compared to previous approaches, the method can extract shapes more precisely, and the segmented result contains minimal artifacts, achieves the dice coefficient of 0.83, precision of 0.859, and recall of 0.803.
淋巴系统遍布全身，负责运输体液，并在免疫反应中发挥关键作用。光学相干断层扫描（OCT）是一种新兴技术，利用淋巴液的低散射特性对毛细淋巴管进行无创、无标记成像。在此，所提出的淋巴分割方法结合了基于U-Net的卷积神经网络（CNN）、黑塞血管性滤波器和改进的强度阈值处理，以基于二值化的黑塞掩码搜索附近像素。与先前的方法相比，该方法能够更精确地提取形状，分割结果中的伪影最少，骰子系数达到0.83，精度为0.859，召回率为0.803。
