Unsupervised Cerebrovascular Segmentation of TOF-MRA Images Based on Deep Neural Network and Hidden Markov Random Field Model

Automated cerebrovascular segmentation of time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (TOF-MRA) images is an important technique, which can be used to diagnose abnormalities in the cerebrovascular system, such as vascular stenosis and malformation. Automated cerebrovascular segmentation can direct show the shape, direction and distribution of blood vessels. Although deep neural network (DNN)-based cerebrovascular segmentation methods have shown to yield outstanding performance, they are limited by their dependence on huge training dataset. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised cerebrovascular segmentation method of TOF-MRA images based on DNN and hidden Markov random field (HMRF) model. Our DNN-based cerebrovascular segmentation model is trained by the labeling of HMRF rather than manual annotations. The proposed method was trained and tested using 100 TOF-MRA images. The results were evaluated using the dice similarity coefficient (DSC), which reached a value of 0.79. The trained model achieved better performance than that of the traditional HMRF-based cerebrovascular segmentation method in binary pixel-classification. This paper combines the advantages of both DNN and HMRF to train the model with a not so large amount of the annotations in deep learning, which leads to a more effective cerebrovascular segmentation method.