Segmentation of coronary artery and calcification using prior knowledge based deep learning framework.

Background: Computed tomography angiography (CTA) is used to screen for coronary artery calcification. As the coronary artery has complicated structure and tiny lumen, manual screening is a time-consuming task. Recently, many deep learning methods have been proposed for the segmentation (SEG) of coronary artery and calcification, however, they often neglect leveraging related anatomical prior knowledge, resulting in low accuracy and instability.

Purpose: This study aims to build a deep learning based SEG framework, which leverages anatomical prior knowledge of coronary artery and calcification, to improve the SEG accuracy. Moreover, based on the SEG results, this study also try to reveal the predictive ability of the volume ratio of coronary artery and calcification for rotational atherectomy (RA).

Methods: We present a new SEG framework, which is composed of four modules: the variational autoencoder based centerline extraction (CE) module, the self-attention (SA) module, the logic operation (LO) module, and the SEG module. Specifically, the CE module is used to crop a series of 3D CTA patches along the coronary artery, from which the continuous property of vessels can be utilized by the SA module to produce vessel-related features. According to the spatial relations between coronary artery lumen and calcification regions, the LO module with logic union and intersection is designed to refine the vessel-related features into lumen- and calcification-related features, based on which SEG results can be produced by the SEG module.

Results: Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on CTA image dataset of 72 patients with statistical significance. Ablation experiments confirm that the proposed modules have positive impacts to the SEG results. Moreover, based on the volume ratio of segmented coronary artery and calcification, the prediction accuracy of RA is 0.75.

Conclusions: Integrating anatomical prior knowledge of coronary artery and calcification into the deep learning based SEG framework can effectively enhance the performance. Moreover, the volume ratio of segmented coronary artery and calcification is a good predictive factor for RA.