A Vein Segmentation Method Based on Improved U-Net

Recently, medical research has revealed that diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) is less sensitive than susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) for acute ischemic stroke. Brain vein analysis in SWI is very important for personalised therapy, quantitative diagnosis, and prognosis of acute ischemic stroke. Therefore, the accurate segmentation of veins in SWI images has important significance in supplementary diagnosis and medical research. However, vein segmentation in SWI is a challenging task because different veins show distinct variability and uneven intensity and are difficult to manually split. This paper proposes an improvement method based on U-net, by using dense connection and mixing loss function, the best Dice coefficient and the ASSD were obtained by other comparison methods. The method presented in this article can be used as a potential tool to accurately measure SWI cerebral veins and help physicians in decision making.