Benefit from public unlabeled data: A Frangi filter-based pretraining network for 3D cerebrovascular segmentation.

Abstract

Precise cerebrovascular segmentation in Time-of-Flight Magnetic Resonance Angiography (TOF-MRA) data is crucial for computer-aided clinical diagnosis. The sparse distribution of cerebrovascular structures within TOF-MRA images often results in high costs for manual data labeling. Leveraging unlabeled TOF-MRA data can significantly enhance model performance. In this study, we have constructed the largest preprocessed unlabeled TOF-MRA dataset to date, comprising 1510 subjects. Additionally, we provide manually annotated segmentation masks for 113 subjects based on existing external image datasets to facilitate evaluation. We propose a simple yet effective pretraining strategy utilizing the Frangi filter, known for its capability to enhance vessel-like structures, to optimize the use of the unlabeled data for 3D cerebrovascular segmentation. This involves a Frangi filter-based preprocessing workflow tailored for large-scale unlabeled datasets and a multi-task pretraining strategy to efficiently utilize the preprocessed data. This approach ensures maximal extraction of useful knowledge from the unlabeled data. The efficacy of the pretrained model is assessed across four cerebrovascular segmentation datasets, where it demonstrates superior performance, improving the clDice metric by approximately 2%-3% compared to the latest semi- and self-supervised methods. Additionally, ablation studies validate the generalizability and effectiveness of our pretraining method across various backbone structures. The code and data have been open source at: https://github.com/shigen-StoneRoot/FFPN.