Physics and Morphology Constrained Quantitative Susceptibility Based Segmentation of Cerebral Veins
Abstract
Purpose: Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) provides venous contrast through the paramagnetic susceptibility of deoxyhemoglobin and can be used to estimate oxygen extraction fraction (OEF), a marker of cerebral metabolism. However, cerebral vein segmentation remains challenging due to artifacts, variability across QSM reconstruction methods, and limited sensitivity of conventional vessel-filtering approaches to small cortical veins. This study proposes a physics- and morphology-constrained deep learning framework for cerebral vein segmentation on QSM.
Methods: Thirty subjects were manually segmented and used to train an attention-gated U-Net. In addition to supervised Dice and cross-entropy losses, the network incorporated two self-supervised constraints. A physics-informed loss enforced consistency between the measured local field and a field simulated from predicted veins using dipole convolution. A Frangi vesselness loss encouraged anatomically plausible tubular structures. Segmentation performance was evaluated on an independent multi-center cohort and compared with a prior vessel-filtering method and a supervised U-Net baseline. Physiological relevance was assessed by comparing QSM-derived venous OEF with calibrated fMRI-derived OEF.
Results: The proposed model achieved superior segmentation performance (centreline Dice = 0.70 ± 0.08) compared with MSVF (0.44 ± 0.09) and the U-Net baseline (0.57 ± 0.14). Improvements were most pronounced in smaller veins,…
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Evidence Hub reads this as a cohort study. Its evidence level is 3 of 5 (Moderate · trial / cohort / secondary analysis). Trials without a large randomized design, cohorts and secondary analyses give moderate evidence.
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