Previous work on methods for cross domain generalization in medical imaging found a simple but very effective method called ”global intensity non-linear” (GIN) augmentation. Our goal in this study is to use the GIN approach to train a model as powerful as TotalSegmentator for MRI data, despite having neither sufficient amounts of MRI data nor ground truth organ contours. Instead, we employ the GIN augmentation approach to show qualitatively and quantitatively that this is indeed feasible for a diverse set of anatomical structures including abdominal and thoracic organs as well as bones. The models are trained on the TotalSegmentator and AMOS22 datasets. For evaluation we apply them to whole body MRI scans from the German National Cohort (NAKO) study with a set of in-house reference masks. With GIN augmentation the mean Dice score of the model increases from 0.18 to 0.52 on Dixon water images, when using TotalSegmentator data for training. The improvements can be further split into 0.47 to 0.66 for abdominal organs, 0.55 to 0.79 for thoracic organs and 0.00 to 0.40 for bones.
Varicose veins are classified as a chronic venous disease of which almost a quarter of the population of the U.S suffers from.1 Although most cases only develop mild symptoms, 6% of the affected women and men between 40 and 80 years develop signs of chronic vein insufficiency like venous ulceration.2 The number of these patients is two million in the U.S. alone. Treatment of varicose veins was mostly composed of surgical interventions until thermal endovenous ablation was introduced3 which resulted in lower cost and faster recovery of the patient.2 A new completely non-invasive method is High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) in which an ultrasound pulse is applied from outside the skin surface in order to thermally ablate the vein and close it permanently.3 This method relies heavily on diagnostic imaging through ultrasound to detect the target vein for ablation and to guide and monitor the procedure. An automated approach to detect and localize the vein during the treatment is rational because of the tedious work to follow the vessel in transversal direction. Previous works in the field of vessel segmentation in ultrasound images with deep learning focus on the frame-wise segmentation of the vessel.4 The possibility of further improvement of this method can be achieved by leveraging the temporal information about the location of the vessel. A previous work proposed by Mathai et. al.5 also features a U-net which implements LSTM-layers in the decoder part of the network and is used for the segmentation of vessels in ultrasound images. The segmentation of ultrasound image sequences can be combined with the prediction of segmentations of future frames to improve the predictive capacity of the model. Zhao et. al. proposed to use a ConvLSTM to predict future frames of ultrasound images for tongue movement,6 which was successful in predicting the next ultrasound image for a sequence of eight frames. In this work we propose a deep learning method for the localization and segmentation of veins in ultrasound sequences in combination with the prediction of future vessel segmentations for the automation of HIFU ablation treatments.
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