自动分割血管并修复血流数据,提升脑部4D MRI的临床可用性。
VAST: Vascular Flow Analysis and Segmentation for Intracranial 4D Flow MRI
- 从原始数据直接迭代融合幅值与相位信息,实现无需人工干预的血管分割。
- 在信噪比2-20、相位缠绕达五倍的情况下,速度误差降低四倍,表面精度接近四分之一体素。
- 适合脑血管病研究者使用,尤其关注血流动力学定量分析的临床医生。
四维(4D)流式MRI可无创测量脑血管血流动力学,但因当前流程依赖人工血管分割,且速度场易受噪声、伪影和相位缠绕影响,尚未广泛应用于临床。本文提出VAST(血管流分析与分割),一个自动化、无监督的颅内4D流式MRI处理流程,将血管分割与物理约束的速度重建相结合。VAST通过迭代融合幅度与相位的背景统计信息,直接从复杂4D流数据中提取血管掩码;随后利用连续性约束相位解缠、异常值校正和低秩去噪,减少噪声与缠绕,同时保证质量守恒的流场,单例处理仅需数分钟(标准CPU)。我们在内部颈动脉瘤模型合成数据(信噪比2–20,严重相位缠绕达五倍)、体外泊肃叶流以及体内颈动脉瘤数据集上验证了VAST。合成数据中,其表面精度接近四分之一体素,最差条件下速度均方根误差降低四倍;体外实验中,分割结果距专家标注误差约半个体素,速度误差减少39%(解缠后)和77%(缠绕时);体内实验中,其分割结果接近专家TOF掩码,发散残差降低约30%,表明流场更具自洽性。通过自动化处理并强制遵守基本流体力学规律,VAST推动颅内4D流式MRI向脑血管评估的常规定量应用迈进。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Four-dimensional (4D) Flow MRI can noninvasively measure cerebrovascular hemodynamics but remains underused clinically because current workflows rely on manual vessel segmentation and yield velocity fields sensitive to noise, artifacts, and phase aliasing. We present VAST (Vascular Flow Analysis and Segmentation), an automated, unsupervised pipeline for intracranial 4D Flow MRI that couples vessel segmentation with physics-informed velocity reconstruction. VAST derives vessel masks directly from complex 4D Flow data by iteratively fusing magnitude- and phase-based background statistics. It then reconstructs velocities via continuity-constrained phase unwrapping, outlier correction, and low-rank denoising to reduce noise and aliasing while promoting mass-consistent flow fields, with processing completing in minutes per case on a standard CPU. We validate VAST on synthetic data from an internal carotid artery aneurysm model across SNR = 2-20 and severe phase wrapping (up to five-fold), on in vitro Poiseuille flow, and on an in vivo internal carotid aneurysm dataset. In synthetic benchmarks, VAST maintains near quarter-voxel surface accuracy and reduces velocity root-mean-square error by up to fourfold under the most degraded conditions. In vitro, it segments the channel within approximately half a voxel of expert annotations and reduces velocity error by 39% (unwrapped) and 77% (aliased). In vivo, VAST closely matches expert time-of-flight masks and lowers divergence residuals by about 30%, indicating a more self-consistent intracranial flow field. By automating processing and enforcing basic flow physics, VAST helps move intracranial 4D Flow MRI toward routine quantitative use in cerebrovascular assessment.
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