Label Propagation for 3D Carotid Vessel Wall Segmentation and Atherosclerosis Diagnosis

Abstract: Carotid vessel wall segmentation is a crucial yet challenging task in the computer-aided diagnosis of atherosclerosis. Although numerous deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in many medical image segmentation tasks, accurate segmentation of carotid vessel wall on magnetic resonance (MR) images remains challenging, due to limited annotations and heterogeneous arteries. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised label propagation framework to segment lumen, normal vessel walls, and atherosclerotic vessel wall on 3D MR images. By interpolating the provided annotations, we get 3D continuous labels for training 3D segmentation model. With the trained model, we generate pseudo labels for unlabeled slices to incorporate them for model training. Then we use the whole MR scans and the propagated labels to re-train the segmentation model and improve its robustness. We evaluated the label propagation framework on the CarOtid vessel wall SegMentation and atherosclerOsis diagnosiS (COSMOS) Challenge dataset and achieved a QuanM score of 83.41\% on the testing dataset, which got the 1-st place on the online evaluation leaderboard. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.