论文标题
使用几何深度学习监督的拖拉图过滤
Supervised Tractogram Filtering using Geometric Deep Learning
论文作者
论文摘要
拖拉图是脑白质的虚拟表示。它由数百万个虚拟纤维组成,编码为3D二极管,近似于白质轴突途径。迄今为止,拖拉图是最准确的白质表示形式,因此用于诸如神经塑性,脑部疾病或脑网络的术前计划和研究。但是,众所周知的问题是,很大一部分拖拉纤维在解剖学上并不合理,并且可以被视为跟踪过程的伪像。使用Verifyber,我们解决了使用一种新型的完全监督的学习方法来过滤此类不合格纤维的问题。与基于信号重建和/或大脑拓扑正则化的其他方法不同,我们使用现有的白质解剖学知识来指导我们的方法。使用根据解剖学原理注释的拖拉图,我们训练模型验证,将纤维分类为解剖学上合理或不可见的纤维。提出的验证模型是一种原始的几何深度学习方法,可以处理可变尺寸的纤维,同时又是纤维方向不变的。我们的模型将每根光纤视为点图,并且通过通过提出的序列边缘卷积之间的边缘学习边缘的学习特征,它可以捕获潜在的解剖学特性。在一组广泛的实验中,输出过滤结果高度准确,稳健,并且快速;使用12GB GPU,过滤1M纤维的拖拉图需要少于一分钟。可在https://github.com/fbk-nilab/verifyber上获得验证者实现和训练有素的模型。
A tractogram is a virtual representation of the brain white matter. It is composed of millions of virtual fibers, encoded as 3D polylines, which approximate the white matter axonal pathways. To date, tractograms are the most accurate white matter representation and thus are used for tasks like presurgical planning and investigations of neuroplasticity, brain disorders, or brain networks. However, it is a well-known issue that a large portion of tractogram fibers is not anatomically plausible and can be considered artifacts of the tracking procedure. With Verifyber, we tackle the problem of filtering out such non-plausible fibers using a novel fully-supervised learning approach. Differently from other approaches based on signal reconstruction and/or brain topology regularization, we guide our method with the existing anatomical knowledge of the white matter. Using tractograms annotated according to anatomical principles, we train our model, Verifyber, to classify fibers as either anatomically plausible or non-plausible. The proposed Verifyber model is an original Geometric Deep Learning method that can deal with variable size fibers, while being invariant to fiber orientation. Our model considers each fiber as a graph of points, and by learning features of the edges between consecutive points via the proposed sequence Edge Convolution, it can capture the underlying anatomical properties. The output filtering results highly accurate and robust across an extensive set of experiments, and fast; with a 12GB GPU, filtering a tractogram of 1M fibers requires less than a minute. Verifyber implementation and trained models are available at https://github.com/FBK-NILab/verifyber.