Efficient Anatomical Labeling of Pulmonary Tree Structures via Implicit Point-Graph Networks

Pulmonary diseases rank prominently among the principal causes of death worldwide. Curing them will require, among other things, a better understanding of the many complex 3D tree-shaped structures within the pulmonary system, such as airways, arteries, and veins. In theory, they can be modeled using high-resolution image stacks. Unfortunately, standard CNN approaches operating on dense voxel grids are prohibitively expensive. To remedy this, we introduce a point-based approach that preserves graph connectivity of tree skeleton and incorporates an implicit surface representation. It delivers SOTA accuracy at a low computational cost and the resulting models have usable surfaces. Due to the scarcity of publicly accessible data, we have also curated an extensive dataset to evaluate our approach and will make it public.

Topology Repairing of Disconnected Pulmonary Airways and Vessels: Baselines and a Dataset

Accurate segmentation of pulmonary airways and vessels is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary diseases. However, current deep learning approaches suffer from disconnectivity issues that hinder their clinical usefulness. To address this challenge, we propose a post-processing approach that leverages a data-driven method to repair the topology of disconnected pulmonary tubular structures. Our approach formulates the problem as a keypoint detection task, where a neural network is trained to predict keypoints that can bridge disconnected components. We use a training data synthesis pipeline that generates disconnected data from complete pulmonary structures. Moreover, the new Pulmonary Tree Repairing (PTR) dataset is publicly available, which comprises 800 complete 3D models of pulmonary airways, arteries, and veins, as well as the synthetic disconnected data. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/M3DV/pulmonary-tree-repairing.