核心概念
Accurate and abundant segmentation of pulmonary arteries and veins can be achieved from non-contrast CT scans using the proposed HiPaS framework, enabling contrast-agent-free diagnosis and revealing novel associations between pulmonary vessel abundance and sex and age.
摘要
The authors present HiPaS, a deep learning-based framework for accurate and abundant segmentation of pulmonary arteries and veins from both non-contrast CT and contrast-enhanced CT pulmonary angiography (CTPA) scans.
Key highlights:
- HiPaS incorporates an Inter-and-Intra-slice Super Resolution (I2SR) module to address spatial anisotropy and a Saliency-Transmission Segmentation (STS) module to enhance perception of multiscale vascular features.
- The authors established a large multi-center dataset with meticulous manual annotations of pulmonary arteries and veins, enabling comprehensive model training and evaluation.
- Extensive experiments on external datasets demonstrated the superior performance of HiPaS, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 7-13% in dice score and 15-20% in sensitivity.
- HiPaS achieved non-inferior segmentation performance on non-contrast CT compared to CTPA, the clinical gold standard.
- Employing HiPaS, the authors conducted a large-scale anatomical study on 10,613 participants, revealing novel associations between pulmonary vessel abundance and sex and age.
The authors conclude that HiPaS enables accurate, contrast-agent-free pulmonary ar/v segmentation, facilitating clinical diagnosis and understanding of pulmonary physiology.
统计
Pulmonary arteries have significantly longer skeleton length (13998±2895 cm for males, 10949±2540 cm for females) and more branch counts (1858±496 for males, 1554±509 for females) compared to females, when controlling for lung volume (p<0.0001).
Pulmonary vessel abundance, as measured by skeleton length and branch counts, exhibits a slightly decreasing trend with age in both males and females (p<0.0001).
Females show a larger linear regression coefficient of vessel skeleton length and branch counts with lung volume compared to males (p<0.0001).
引用
"Females exhibit more vessel branch counts and longer skeleton length of the pulmonary vessels compared to males when controlling for the lung volume."
"Age presents a negative association with pulmonary vessel abundance."