Deep Placental Vessel Segmentation for Fetoscopic Mosaicking

Sophia Bano*, Francisco Vasconcelos, Luke M. Shepherd, Emmanuel Vander Poorten, Tom Vercauteren, Sebastien Ourselin, Anna L. David, Jan Deprest, Danail Stoyanov

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paperpeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

During fetoscopic laser photocoagulation, a treatment for twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), the clinician first identifies abnormal placental vascular connections and laser ablates them to regulate blood flow in both fetuses. The procedure is challenging due to the mobility of the environment, poor visibility in amniotic fluid, occasional bleeding, and limitations in the fetoscopic field-of-view and image quality. Ideally, anastomotic placental vessels would be automatically identified, segmented and registered to create expanded vessel maps to guide laser ablation, however, such methods have yet to be clinically adopted. We propose a solution utilising the U-Net architecture for performing placental vessel segmentation in fetoscopic videos. The obtained vessel probability maps provide sufficient cues for mosaicking alignment by registering consecutive vessel maps using the direct intensity-based technique. Experiments on 6 different in vivo fetoscopic videos demonstrate that the vessel intensity-based registration outperformed image intensity-based registration approaches showing better robustness in qualitative and quantitative comparison. We additionally reduce drift accumulation to negligible even for sequences with up to 400 frames and we incorporate a scheme for quantifying drift error in the absence of the ground-truth. Our paper provides a benchmark for fetoscopy placental vessel segmentation and registration by contributing the first in vivo vessel segmentation and fetoscopic videos dataset.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2020 - 23rd International Conference, Proceedings
EditorsAnne L. Martel, Purang Abolmaesumi, Danail Stoyanov, Diana Mateus, Maria A. Zuluaga, S. Kevin Zhou, Daniel Racoceanu, Leo Joskowicz
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages763-773
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9783030597153
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event23rd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2020 - Lima, Peru
Duration: 4 Oct 20208 Oct 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12263 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference23rd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2020
Country/TerritoryPeru
CityLima
Period4/10/20208/10/2020

Keywords

  • Deep learning
  • Fetoscopy
  • Mosaicking
  • Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome
  • Vessel registration
  • Vessel segmentation

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