Few-shot small vessel segmentation using a detail-preserving network enhanced by discriminator

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of small vessels, such as coronary and pulmonary arteries, is crucial for early detection and treatment of vascular diseases. However, challenges persist due to the vessel's small size, complex structures, morphological variations, and limited annotated data. To address these challenges, we propose a detail-preserving network enhanced by a discriminator to improve the few-shot small vessel segmentation performance. The detail-preserving network constructs a complex module with multi-residual hybrid dilated convolution, which can enhance the network's receptive field while preserving the image's full detail features, enabling it to better capture the small vessel's structural features. Simultaneously, discriminator enhancement is incorporated into the training process through adversarial learning, effectively utilizing large amounts of unlabeled data to boost the generalization and robustness of the segmentation model. We validate the proposed method on in-house and public coronary artery datasets and public pulmonary artery datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves segmentation accuracy, particularly for small vessels. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method achieves higher accuracy, a lower false positive rate, and superior generalization capability, effectively assisting the clinical diagnosis of vessel diseases.

Keywords: Adversarial learning; Dilated convolutions; Few-shot learning; Vessel segmentation.