Segmentation of coronary arteries images using global feature embedded network with active contour loss.

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is a serious disease that endangers human health and life. In recent years, the morbidity and mortality of CHD are increasing significantly. Because of the particularity and complexity of medical image, it is challenging to segment coronary artery accurately and efficiently. This paper proposes a novel global feature embedded network for better coronary arteries segmentation in 3D coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) data. The global feature combines multi-level layers from various stages of the network, which contains semantic information and detailed features, aiming to accurately segment target with precise boundary. In addition, we integrate a group of improved noisy activating functions with parameters into our network to eliminate the impact of noise in CTA data. And we improve the learning active contour model, which obtains a refined segmentation result with smooth boundary based on the high-quality score map produced by the networks. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieved the state-of-the-art performance intuitively and quantitively.