NVNet: An Enhanced Attention Network for Segmenting Neck Vascular from Ultrasound Images

Bohao Zhang, Changbo Wang, Chenhui Li

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Ultrasound images often contain much noise, and the examination process is easily affected by many factors. Therefore, it is often necessary for ultrasound surgeons to have rich experience in accurately identifying neck vascular from ultrasound images. The NVNet proposed in this paper can accurately segment neck vessels and accurately segment carotid intima-media from ultrasound images. We use an improved full-scale skip connection to obtain richer feature information from the encoder and introduce enhanced attention mechanism, making it possible for NVNet to identify neck vascular from ultrasound images containing much noise accurately. Due to the lack of available datasets, we collate an entirely new carotid longitudinal sectional ultrasound dataset and carry out data annotation under ultrasound surgeons' guidance. The experiment is carried out on the collated dataset and another public dataset of cross-sectional ultrasound images, including carotid artery and internal jugular vein. The final experimental results prove that the segmentation accuracy of NVNet exceeds that of many well-known models in recent years.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIJCNN 2021 - International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9780738133669
DOIs
StatePublished - 18 Jul 2021
Event2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2021 - Virtual, Shenzhen, China
Duration: 18 Jul 202122 Jul 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
Volume2021-July

Conference

Conference2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2021
Country/TerritoryChina
CityVirtual, Shenzhen
Period18/07/2122/07/21

Keywords

  • attention mechanism
  • medical image segmentation
  • neural network
  • skip connection
  • vascular ultrasound

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