• Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences
  • Vol. 16, Issue 4, 2350009 (2023)
Yuxin Li1, Qianlong Zhang1, Hang Zhou2, Junhuai Li1, Xiangning Li3、4, and Anan Li3、4、*
Author Affiliations
  • 1Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Network Computing and Security Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an 710048, P. R. China
  • 2School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, P. R. China
  • 3Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics MoE Key, Laboratory for Biomedical Photonics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, P. R. China
  • 4HUST-Suzhou Institute for Brainsmatics, Suzhou 215123, P. R. China
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    DOI: 10.1142/S1793545823500098 Cite this Article
    Yuxin Li, Qianlong Zhang, Hang Zhou, Junhuai Li, Xiangning Li, Anan Li. Cerebrovascular segmentation from mesoscopic optical images using Swin Transformer[J]. Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, 2023, 16(4): 2350009 Copy Citation Text show less

    Abstract

    Vascular segmentation is a crucial task in biomedical image processing, which is significant for analyzing and modeling vascular networks under physiological and pathological states. With advances in fluorescent labeling and mesoscopic optical techniques, it has become possible to map the whole-mouse-brain vascular networks at capillary resolution. However, segmenting vessels from mesoscopic optical images is a challenging task. The problems, such as vascular signal discontinuities, vessel lumens, and background fluorescence signals in mesoscopic optical images, belong to global semantic information during vascular segmentation. Traditional vascular segmentation methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been limited by their insufficient receptive fields, making it challenging to capture global semantic information of vessels and resulting in inaccurate segmentation results. Here, we propose SegVesseler, a vascular segmentation method based on Swin Transformer. SegVesseler adopts 3D Swin Transformer blocks to extract global contextual information in 3D images. This approach is able to maintain the connectivity and topology of blood vessels during segmentation. We evaluated the performance of our method on mouse cerebrovascular datasets generated from three different labeling and imaging modalities. The experimental results demonstrate that the segmentation effect of our method is significantly better than traditional CNNs and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
    Yuxin Li, Qianlong Zhang, Hang Zhou, Junhuai Li, Xiangning Li, Anan Li. Cerebrovascular segmentation from mesoscopic optical images using Swin Transformer[J]. Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, 2023, 16(4): 2350009
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