Automatic segmentation of bioabsorbable vascular stents in Intravascular optical coherence images using weakly supervised attention network

Coronary heart disease has become a disease with high mortality in the world. The main treatment for coronary heart disease is stent implantation, and there is now a consensus that bioabsorbable vascular stent (BVS) is the most advanced stent. However, the accuracy of current methods to detect and segment the BVS is still not effctive enough to meet the medical needs, or it is difficult to generalize. Meanwhile, due to the influence of blood artifact, the gray-based method also has great errors and uncertainties. In this paper, we propose a new framework to segment the BVS, in order to segment the contour of BVS more accurately, we use the U-Net network as the main part of the proposed network structure, add convolutional attention layer and dilated convolution module, and finally use weakly supervised learning strategy to further enhance performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each designed module in our proposed network can effectively improve the accuracy of the segmentation result, and when compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the overall performance on different criterias is higher. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.