Clinical Risk-Aware Multi-Level Grading for Coronary Artery Stenosis through Curved Feature Reconstruction

Developing a multi-level grading model for coronary artery stenosis holds great clinical significance for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. However, designing an effective multi-level deep learning algorithm faces significant challenges. Specifically, utilizing CCTA or 3D SCPR images alone presents inherent shortcomings: CCTA images are difficult to analyze due to the tortuous paths of blood vessels, while 3D SCPR images are prone to abnormal distortions that hinder accurate grading. Furthermore, different stenosis grades are associated with varying clinical risks, and incorporating this association into the algorithm is non-trivial. To address the former problems, we propose the Curved Feature Reconstruction (CFR) module, which uses vessel curves as prior and employs a point-by-point correspondence strategy to precisely align and fuse features from both 3D SCPR and CCTA images. Meanwhile, a Clinical Risk-Aware (CR) Loss is employed to introduce clinical risk relevance into the network training so that the algorithm can better align with the clinical diagnosis. The experimental results on a in-house dataset reveal that our approach significantly outperforms other methods, and several ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed designs.

Topology-Preserving Automatic Labeling of Coronary Arteries via Anatomy-aware Connection Classifier

Automatic labeling of coronary arteries is an essential task in the practical diagnosis process of cardiovascular diseases. For experienced radiologists, the anatomically predetermined connections are important for labeling the artery segments accurately, while this prior knowledge is barely explored in previous studies. In this paper, we present a new framework called TopoLab which incorporates the anatomical connections into the network design explicitly. Specifically, the strategies of intra-segment feature aggregation and inter-segment feature interaction are introduced for hierarchical segment feature extraction. Moreover, we propose the anatomy-aware connection classifier to enable classification for each connected segment pair, which effectively exploits the prior topology among the arteries with different categories. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we contribute high-quality annotations of artery labeling to the public orCaScore dataset. The experimental results on both the orCaScore dataset and an in-house dataset show that our TopoLab has achieved state-of-the-art performance.