Raster-scan optoacoustic mesoscopy (RSOM) is a powerful, non-invasive optical imaging technique for functional, anatomical, and molecular skin and tissue analysis. However, both the manual and the automated analysis of such images are challenging, because the RSOM images have very low contrast, poor signal to noise ratio, and systematic overlaps between the absorption spectra of melanin and hemoglobin. Nonetheless, the segmentation of the epidermis layer is a crucial step for many downstream medical and diagnostic tasks, such as vessel segmentation or monitoring of cancer progression. We propose a novel, shape-specific loss function that overcomes discontinuous segmentations and achieves smooth segmentation surfaces while preserving the same volumetric Dice and IoU. Further, we validate our epidermis segmentation through the sensitivity of vessel segmentation. We found a 20 % improvement in Dice for vessel segmentation tasks when the epidermis mask is provided as additional information to the vessel segmentation network.
@article{arxiv.2007.05324,
title = {A distance-based loss for smooth and continuous skin layer segmentation in optoacoustic images},
author = {Stefan Gerl and Johannes C. Paetzold and Hailong He and Ivan Ezhov and Suprosanna Shit and Florian Kofler and Amirhossein Bayat and Giles Tetteh and Vasilis Ntziachristos and Bjoern Menze},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.05324},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Accepted at International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2020