Poincare guided geometric UNet for left atrial epicardial adipose tissue segmentation in Dixon MRI images

Epicardial Adipose Tissue (EAT) is a recognized risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and plays a pivotal role in the pathophysiology of Atrial Fibrillation (AF). Accurate automatic segmentation of the EAT around the Left Atrium (LA) from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data remains challenging. While Convolutional Neural Networks excel at multi-scale feature extraction using stacked convolutions, they struggle to capture long-range self-similarity and hierarchical relationships, which are essential in medical image segmentation. In this study, we present and validate PoinUNet, a deep learning model that integrates a Poincaré embedding layer into a 3D UNet to enhance LA wall and fat segmentation from Dixon MRI data. By using hyperbolic space learning, PoinUNet captures complex LA and EAT relationships and addresses class imbalance and fat geometry challenges using a new loss function. Sixty-six participants, including forty-eight AF patients, were scanned at 1.5T. The first network identified fat regions, while the second utilized Poincaré embeddings and convolutional layers for precise segmentation, enhanced by fat fraction maps. PoinUNet achieved a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 0.87 and a Hausdorff distance of 9.42 on the test set. This performance surpasses state-of-the-art methods, providing accurate quantification of the LA wall and LA EAT.