Affiliation:
1. Electrical Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Raipur 492010, India
Abstract
Background:
Airway segmentation is a way to quantify the diagnosis of pulmonary diseases,
including chronic obstructive problems and bronchiectasis. Manual analysis by radiologists is a
challenging task due to the complex airway structure. Additionally, tree-like patterns, varied shapes,
sizes, and intensity make the manual airway segmentation task more complex. Deeper airways are
even more difficult to segment as their intensity starts matching the lung parenchyma as the diameter
of the airway cross-section gets reduced.
Objective:
Many earlier works have proposed different deep learning networks for airway segmentation
but were unable to achieve the desired performance; hence the task of airway segmentation still
possesses challenges in this field.
Method:
This work proposes a convolutional neural network based on deep U-Net architecture and
employs an attention block technique for airway segmentation. The attention mechanism aids in the
extraction of the complicated and multi-sized airways found in the lung region, hence increasing the
efficiency of the U-Net architecture.
Results:
The model has been validated using VESSEL12 and EXACT09 datasets, individually and
combined, with and without trachea images. The best DSC scores on EXACT09 and VESSEL12 datasets
are 95.21% and 95.80%, respectively. The performance on both datasets combined gave a DSC
score of 94.1%, showing that the overall performance of the proposed methodology is quite satisfactory.
The generalizability of the model is also confirmed using k-fold cross-validation. The comparison
of the proposed model to existing research on airway segmentation found competitive results.
Conclusion:
The use of an attention unit in the proposed model highlights the relevant information and
reduces the irrelevant features, which helps to improve the performance and saves time.
Publisher
Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.
Subject
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging