A two-stage extraction network for the optical coherence tomography contour

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) with high resolution was found lucrative for coronary heart disease diagnosis and treatment such as evaluating the degree of vascular stenosis and guiding stent implantation. Lumen contour is an essential information for assessing the shape and stenosis of blood vessels. The automatic and accurate extraction of lumen contour can significantly reduce the burden of doctors and improve the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment of coronary heart disease. The existing contour segmentation methods have poor performance in extracting the contour of the image with a missing blood vessel wall. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-stage contour extraction method based on deep learning. First, the method uses the basic contour extraction network to complete the feature image extraction and coarse contour segmentation, then inputs the feature image into the attentional class feature (ACF) module, and uses the coarse segmentation results to guide the generation of the new feature map for the refined contour segmentation. Finally, the fully connected conditional random field (CRF) module is used for post-processing yielding a more refined and smooth segmentation boundary. The experiments show that compared with the other methods, the lumen contour segmentation method proposed in this paper can adequately resolve the problem of partial vessel wall absence in OCT images and improve the accuracy of lumen contour extraction.