Topology Repairing of Disconnected Pulmonary Airways and Vessels: Baselines and a Dataset

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of pulmonary airways and vessels is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary diseases. However, current deep learning approaches suffer from disconnectivity issues that hinder their clinical usefulness. To address this challenge, we propose a post-processing approach that leverages a data-driven method to repair the topology of disconnected pulmonary tubular structures. Our approach formulates the problem as a keypoint detection task, where a neural network is trained to predict keypoints that can bridge disconnected components. We use a training data synthesis pipeline that generates disconnected data from complete pulmonary structures. Moreover, the new Pulmonary Tree Repairing (PTR) dataset is publicly available, which comprises 800 complete 3D models of pulmonary airways, arteries, and veins, as well as the synthetic disconnected data. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/M3DV/pulmonary-tree-repairing.