Zbinden, Lukas; Catucci, Damiano; Suter, Yannick; Berzigotti, Annalisa; Ebner, Lukas; Christe, Andreas; Obmann, Verena Carola; Sznitman, Raphael; Huber, Adrian Thomas (2022). Convolutional neural network for automated segmentation of the liver and its vessels on non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon acquisitions. Scientific Reports, 12(1) Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/s41598-022-26328-2
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We evaluated the effectiveness of automated segmentation of the liver and its vessels with a convolutional neural network on non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon acquisitions. A dataset of non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon liver magnetic resonance images was labelled slice-by-slice for the outer liver border, portal, and hepatic veins by an expert. A 3D U-Net convolutional neural network was trained with different combinations of Dixon in-phase, opposed-phase, water, and fat reconstructions. The neural network trained with the single-modal in-phase reconstructions achieved a high performance for liver parenchyma (Dice 0.936 ± 0.02), portal veins (0.634 ± 0.09), and hepatic veins (0.532 ± 0.12) segmentation. No benefit of using multi -modal input was observed (p=1.0 for all experiments), combining in-phase, opposed-phase, fat, and water reconstruction. Accuracy for differentiation between portal and hepatic veins was 99% for portal veins and 97% for hepatic veins in the central region and slightly lower in the peripheral region (91% for portal veins, 80% for hepatic veins). In conclusion, deep learning-based automated segmentation of the liver and its vessels on non-contrast T1 vibe Dixon was highly effective. The single-modal in-phase input achieved the best performance in segmentation and differentiation between portal and hepatic veins.