The auto segmentation for cardiac structures using a dual-input deep learning network based on vision saliency and transformer

Purpose: Accurate segmentation of cardiac structures on coronary CT angiography (CCTA) images is crucial for the morphological analysis, measurement, and functional evaluation. In this study, we achieve accurate automatic segmentation of cardiac structures on CCTA image by adopting an innovative deep learning method based on visual attention mechanism and transformer network, and its practical application value is discussed. Methods: We developed a dual-input deep learning network based on visual saliency and transformer (VST), which consists of self-attention mechanism for cardiac structures segmentation. Sixty patients’ CCTA subjects were randomly selected as a development set, which were manual marked by an experienced technician. The proposed vision attention and transformer mode was trained on the patients CCTA images, with a manual contour-derived binary mask used as the learning-based target. We also used the deep supervision strategy by adding auxiliary losses. The loss function of our model was the sum of the Dice loss and cross-entropy loss. To quantitatively evaluate the segmentation results, we calculated the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and Hausdorff distance (HD). Meanwhile, we compare the volume of automatic segmentation and manual segmentation to analyze whether there is statistical difference. Results: Fivefold cross-validation was used to benchmark the segmentation method. The results showed the left ventricular myocardium (LVM, DSC = 0.87), the left ventricular (LV, DSC = 0.94), the left atrial (LA, DSC = 0.90), the right ventricular (RV, DSC = 0.92), the right atrial (RA, DSC = 0.91), and the aortic (AO, DSC = 0.96). The average DSC was 0.92, and HD was 7.2 ± 2.1 mm. In volume comparison, except LVM and LA (p < 0.05), there was no significant statistical difference in other structures. Proposed method for structural segmentation fit well with the true profile of the cardiac substructure, and the model prediction results closed to the manual annotation. Conclusions: The adoption of the dual-input and transformer architecture based on visual saliency has high sensitivity and specificity to cardiac structures segmentation, which can obviously improve the accuracy of automatic substructure segmentation. This is of gr.