Comparison of deep learning-based image segmentation methods for intravascular ultrasound on retrospective and large image cohort study

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to investigate the generalization performance of deep learning segmentation models on a large cohort intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image dataset over the lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM), and to assess the consistency and accuracy of automated IVUS quantitative measurement parameters. METHODS: A total of 11,070 IVUS images from 113 patients and pullbacks were collected and annotated by cardiologists to train and test deep learning segmentation models. A comparison of five state of the art medical image segmentation models was performed by evaluating the segmentation of the lumen and EEM. Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), intersection over union (IoU) and Hausdorff distance (HD) were calculated for the overall and for subsets of different IVUS image categories. Further, the agreement between the IVUS quantitative measurement parameters calculated by automatic segmentation and those calculated by manual segmentation was evaluated. Finally, the segmentation performance of our model was also compared with previous studies. RESULTS: CENet achieved the best performance in DSC (0.958 for lumen, 0.921 for EEM) and IoU (0.975 for lumen, 0.951 for EEM) among all models, while Res-UNet was the best performer in HD (0.219 for lumen, 0.178 for EEM). The mean intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland–Altman plot demonstrated the extremely strong agreement (0.855, 95% CI 0.822–0.887) between model's automatic prediction and manual measurements. CONCLUSIONS: Deep learning models based on large cohort image datasets were capable of achieving state of the art (SOTA) results in lumen and EEM segmentation. It can be used for IVUS clinical evaluation and achieve excellent agreement with clinicians on quantitative parameter measurements.