Qu Mingjun, Yang Jinzhu, Li Honghe, Qi Yiqiu, Yu Qi
Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China.
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing in Medical Image, Ministry of Education, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China.
Med Biol Eng Comput. 2025 Feb;63(2):561-573. doi: 10.1007/s11517-024-03201-0. Epub 2024 Oct 17.
Using echocardiography to assess the left ventricular function is one of the most crucial cardiac examinations in clinical diagnosis, and LV segmentation plays a particularly vital role in medical image processing as many important clinical diagnostic parameters are derived from the segmentation results, such as ejection function. However, echocardiography typically has a lower resolution and contains a significant amount of noise and motion artifacts, making it a challenge to accurate segmentation, especially in the region of the cardiac chamber boundary, which significantly restricts the accurate calculation of subsequent clinical parameters. In this paper, our goal is to achieve accurate LV segmentation through a simplified approach by introducing a branch sub-network into the decoder of the traditional U-Net. Specifically, we employed the LV contour features to supervise the branch decoding process and used a cross attention module to facilitate the interaction relationship between the branch and the original decoding process, thereby improving the segmentation performance in the region LV boundaries. In the experiments, the proposed branch U-Net (BU-Net) demonstrated superior performance on CAMUS and EchoNet-dynamic public echocardiography segmentation datasets in comparison to state-of-the-art segmentation models, without the need for complex residual connections or transformer-based architectures. Our codes are publicly available at Anonymous Github https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Anoymous_two-BFF2/ .
使用超声心动图评估左心室功能是临床诊断中最关键的心脏检查之一,并且左心室分割在医学图像处理中起着尤为重要的作用,因为许多重要的临床诊断参数都来自分割结果,比如射血功能。然而,超声心动图通常分辨率较低,并且包含大量噪声和运动伪影,这使得准确分割具有挑战性,尤其是在心脏腔室边界区域,这严重限制了后续临床参数的准确计算。在本文中,我们的目标是通过一种简化方法实现准确的左心室分割,即在传统U-Net的解码器中引入一个分支子网络。具体而言,我们利用左心室轮廓特征来监督分支解码过程,并使用交叉注意力模块来促进分支与原始解码过程之间的交互关系,从而提高左心室边界区域的分割性能。在实验中,与最先进的分割模型相比,所提出的分支U-Net(BU-Net)在CAMUS和EchoNet-dynamic公共超声心动图分割数据集上表现出卓越的性能,无需复杂的残差连接或基于Transformer的架构。我们的代码可在匿名Github https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Anoymous_two-BFF2/ 上公开获取。