Work

Enhanced Cerebrovascular Extraction Using Vessel-Specific Preprocessing of Time-Series Digital Subtraction Angiograph

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Accurate cerebral vasculature segmentation using digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is critical for diagnosing and treating cerebrovascular diseases. However, conventional single-frame analysis methods often fail to capture fine vascular structures due to background noise, overlapping anatomy, and dynamic contrast flow. In this study, we propose a novel vessel-enhancing preprocessing technique using temporal differencing of DSA sequences to improve cerebrovascular segmentation accuracy. Our method emphasizes contrast flow dynamics while suppressing static background components by computing absolute differences between sequential DSA frames. The enhanced images were input into state-of-the-art deep learning models, U-Net++ and DeepLabv3+, for vascular segmentation. Quantitative evaluation of the publicly available DIAS dataset demonstrated significant segmentation improvements across multiple metrics, including the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Intersection over Union (IoU), and Vascular Connectivity (VC). Particularly, DeepLabv3+ with the proposed preprocessing achieved a DSC of 0.83 ± 0.05 and VC of 44.65 ± 0.63, outperforming conventional methods. These results suggest that leveraging temporal information via input enhancement substantially improves small and complex vascular structure extraction. Our approach is computationally efficient, model-agnostic, and clinically applicable for DSA.

Source: Photonics

DOI: 10.3390/photonics12090852

Authors: Taehun Hong, Seonyoung Hong, Eonju Do, Hyewon Ko, Kyuseok Kim, Youngjin Lee

Institution: Gachon University

Language: English

Topic: Medical Image Segmentation Techniques

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896