Yan Hu, University of New South Wales
Airway segmentation is a prerequisite for diagnosing and screening pulmonary diseases. While computer aided algorithms have achieved great success in various medical image segmentation tasks, it remains a challenge in keeping the continuity of airway branches due to the special tubular shape. Some existing airway-specific segmentation models introduce topological representations such as neighbor connectivity and centerline overlapping into deep models and some other methods proposed customized network modules or training strategies based on the characteristics of airways. In this paper, we propose a large-kernel attention block to enlarge the receptive field as well as maintain the details of thin branches. We reformulate the segmentation problem into pixel-wise segmentation and connectivity prediction with a differentiable connectivity modeling technique, and also propose a self-correction loss to minimize the difference between these two tasks. In addition, the binary ground truth is transformed into distances from the boundary, and distance regression is used as additional supervision. Our proposed model has been evaluated on two public datasets, and the results show that our model outperforms other benchmark methods.