Semi-supervised segmentation of coronary DSA using mixed networks and multi-strategies

The coronary arteries supply blood to the myocardium, which originate from the root of the aorta and mainly branch into the left and right. X-ray digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is a technique for evaluating coronary artery plaques and narrowing, that is widely used because of its time efficiency and cost-effectiveness. However, automated coronary vessel classification and segmentation remains challenging using a little data. Therefore, the purpose of this study is twofold: one is to propose a more robust method for vessel segmentation, the other is to provide a solution that is feasible with a small amount of labeled data. Currently, there are three main types of vessel segmentation methods, i.e., graphical- and statistical-based; clustering theory based, and deep learning-based methods for pixel-by-pixel probabilistic prediction, among which the last method is the mainstream with high accuracy and automation. Under this trend, an Inception-SwinUnet (ISUnet) network combining the convolutional neural network and Transformer basic module was proposed in this paper. Considering that data-driven fully supervised learning (FSL) segmentation methods require a large set of paired data with high-quality pixel-level annotation, which is expertise-demanding and time-consuming, we proposed a Semi-supervised Learning (SSL) method to achieve better performance with a small amount of labeled and unlabeled data. Different from the classical SSL method, i.e., Mean-Teacher, our method used two different networks for cross-teaching as the backbone. Meanwhile, inspired by deep supervision and confidence learning (CL), two effective strategies for SSL were adopted, which were denominated Pyramid-consistency Learning (PL) and Confidence Learning (CL), respectively. Both were designed to filter the noise and improve the credibility of pseudo labels generated by unlabeled data. Compared with existing methods, ours achieved superior segmentation performance over other FSL and SSL ones by using data with a small equal number of labels. Code is available in https://github.com/Allenem/SSL4DSA.