End-to-End Real-time Catheter Segmentation with Optical Flow-Guided Warping during Endovascular Intervention
Anh Nguyen, Dennis Kundrat, Giulio Dagnino, Wenqiang Chi, Mohamed E. M. K. Abdelaziz, Yao Guo, YingLiang Ma, Trevor M. Y. Kwok, Celia Riga, Guang‐Zhong Yang
Abstract
Accurate real-time catheter segmentation is an important pre-requisite for robot-assisted endovascular intervention. Most of the existing learning-based methods for catheter segmentation and tracking are only trained on smallscale datasets or synthetic data due to the difficulties of ground-truth annotation. Furthermore, the temporal continuity in intraoperative imaging sequences is not fully utilised. In this paper, we present FW-Net, an end-to-end and real-time deep learning framework for endovascular intervention. The proposed FW-Net has three modules: a segmentation network with encoder-decoder architecture, a flow network to extract optical flow information, and a novel flow-guided warping function to learn the frame-to-frame temporal continuity. We show that by effectively learning temporal continuity, the network can successfully segment and track the catheters in real-time sequences using only raw ground-truth for training. Detailed validation results confirm that our FW-Net outperforms stateof-the-art techniques while achieving real-time performance.