Deep Learning-Based Automated Detection of Arterial Vessel Wall and Plaque on Magnetic Resonance Vessel Wall Images

To develop and evaluate an automatic segmentation method of arterial vessel walls and plaques, which is beneficial for facilitating the arterial morphological quantification in magnetic resonance vessel wall imaging (MRVWI).

MRVWI images acquired from 124 patients with atherosclerotic plaques were included. A convolutional neural network-based deep learning model, namely VWISegNet, was used to extract the features from MRVWI images and calculate the category of each pixel to facilitate the segmentation of vessel wall. Two-dimensional (2D) cross-sectional slices reconstructed from all plaques and 7 main arterial segments of 115 patients were used to build and optimize the deep learning model. The model performance was evaluated on the remaining nine-patient test set using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and average surface distance (ASD).

The proposed automatic segmentation method demonstrated satisfactory agreement with the manual method, with DSCs of 93.8% for lumen contours and 86.0% for outer wall contours, which were higher than those obtained from the traditional U-Net, Attention U-Net, and Inception U-Net on the same nine-subject test set. And all the ASD values were less than 0.198 mm. The Bland-Altman plots and scatter plots also showed that there was a good agreement between the methods. All intraclass correlation coefficient values between the automatic method and manual method were greater than 0.780, and greater than that between two manual reads.

The proposed deep learning-based automatic segmentation method achieved good consistency with the manual methods in the segmentation of arterial vessel wall and plaque and is even more accurate than manual results, hence improved the convenience of arterial morphological quantification.