Deep Learning Based Real-Time Semantic Segmentation of Cerebral Vessels and Cranial Nerves in Microvascular Decompression Scenes

Automatic extraction of cerebral vessels and cranial nerves has important clinical value in the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia (TGN) and hemifacial spasm (HFS). However, because of the great similarity between different cerebral vessels and between different cranial nerves, it is challenging to segment cerebral vessels and cranial nerves in real time on the basis of true-color microvascular decompression (MVD) images. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, fast semantic segmentation Microvascular Decompression Network (MVDNet) for MVD scenarios which achieves a good trade-off between segmentation accuracy and speed. Specifically, we designed a Light Asymmetric Bottleneck (LAB) module in the encoder to encode context features. A Feature Fusion Module (FFM) was introduced into the decoder to effectively combine high-level semantic features and underlying spatial details. The proposed network has no pretrained model, fewer parameters, and a fast inference speed. Specifically, MVDNet achieved 76.59% mIoU on the MVD test set, has 0.72 M parameters, and has a 137 FPS speed using a single GTX 2080Ti card.