用胎儿发育年龄先验指导分割,提升早期和晚期胎脑MRI的准确性。
AtlasSeg: Atlas Prior Guided Dual-U-Net for Cortical Segmentation in Fetal Brain MRI
- 双分支U-Net结构,显式引入孕周信息作为解剖先验
- 平均Dice系数达0.91,在极端孕周下提升显著
- 对低质量图像和对比度变化有强鲁棒性,适合临床早产评估
胎脑MRI组织自动分割是临床诊断的关键步骤,但因胎儿解剖结构与组织对比度随发育动态变化,仍具挑战。现有分割网络仅隐式学习孕周相关特征,导致极早或极晚孕周时准确率下降。为此,我们提出AtlasSeg,一种双分支U-Net架构,显式整合孕周(GA)相关先验信息。通过提供公开可用的胎脑图谱(含对应孕周的分割标签),AtlasSeg在图谱分支中有效提取年龄特异性模式,并在分割分支中生成精准组织分割结果。编码与解码阶段均采用多尺度空间注意力特征融合,增强特征流动并促进两分支间信息交互。我们在七类组织分割任务中对比六种主流网络,AtlasSeg取得最高平均Dice相似系数0.91,尤其在极端孕周(数据稀少)情况下表现更优。此外,其对低质量图像、对比度变化及噪声具有最小性能下降,归因于解剖形状先验。总体上,AtlasSeg显著提升分割精度、跨孕周一致性及对扰动的鲁棒性,特别适用于早孕期诊断评估。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Accurate automatic tissue segmentation in fetal brain MRI is a crucial step in clinical diagnosis but remains challenging, particularly due to the dynamically changing anatomy and tissue contrast during fetal development. Existing segmentation networks can only implicitly learn age-related features, leading to a decline in accuracy at extreme early or late gestational ages (GAs). To improve segmentation performance throughout gestation, we introduce AtlasSeg, a dual-U-shape convolution network that explicitly integrates GA-specific information as guidance. By providing a publicly available fetal brain atlas with segmentation labels corresponding to relevant GAs, AtlasSeg effectively extracts age-specific patterns in the atlas branch and generates precise tissue segmentation in the segmentation branch. Multi-scale spatial attention feature fusions are constructed during both encoding and decoding stages to enhance feature flow and facilitate better information interactions between two branches. We compared AtlasSeg with six well-established networks in a seven-tissue segmentation task, achieving the highest average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.91. The improvement was particularly evident in extreme early or late GA cases, where training data was scare. Furthermore, AtlasSeg exhibited minimal performance degradation on low-quality images with contrast changes and noise, attributed to its anatomical shape priors. Overall, AtlasSeg demonstrated enhanced segmentation accuracy, better consistency across fetal ages, and robustness to perturbations, making it a powerful tool for reliable fetal brain MRI tissue segmentation, particularly suited for diagnostic assessments during early gestation.
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