Cortical Vessel Segmentation for Neuronavigation Using Vesselness-Enforced Deep Neural Networks

We propose in this paper an efficient method to segment cortical vessels in craniotomy images acquired by the surgical microscope. Our method uses a vesselness-enforced convolutional neural network to classify each pixel of a craniotomy image as a vessel or surrounding tissue. This permits training the network not only on appearance-based features but also on geometrical-based constraints that will ensure the continuity of the vascular trees. Our solution uses neural style transfer to generate new instances of images from manually labeled data leading to augment the training dataset in an anatomically semantic manner. The generated images improve the generalization of our model to various types of cortical surface appearances and vascular geometries. We conducted experiments on real images from human patients that demonstrate that accurate intraoperative cortical vessel segmentation can be achieved.