BSC-Net: A Small-Branch-Sensitive Structural Continuity Network for Coronary Vessel Segmentation and Quantitative Angiographic Analysis

2026-09-14

AI Summary

本文提出BSC-Net，通过针对性采样和长程上下文建模等方法改进冠状血管分割中的小血管表示和结构连续性问题。

Abstract

Vessel segmentation in X-ray coronary angiography (XCA) is a fundamental step for quantitative coronary analysis and subsequent assessment of coronary artery disease. However, accurate vessel segmentation remains challenging because of imaging noise, complex bifurcations, and the overlap of vessels and background structures, which can lead to disrupted vascular connectivity and missed small branches. In this work, we propose BSC-Net, a ResNet-U-Net-based framework tailored to improve small-vessel representation and repair vascular structural continuity. BSC-Net enhances small-vessel representation through targeted sampling and improves vascular structural continuity by integrating long-range contextual modeling and Edge-Informed Loss (EIL). BSC-Net was validated on two public XCA datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in coronary vessel segmentation with Dice and IoU scores of 77.8%/90.6% and 64.5%/83.0%, respectively. Furthermore, based on the obtained vessel segmentation, we performed automated quantitative coronary analysis and derived clinically relevant morphological and hemodynamic parameters, including stenosis ratio, time-to-peak, and relative propagation velocity. These results demonstrate that BSC-Net produces accurate vessel segmentation results with preserved vascular continuity for quantitative coronary assessment, enabling reliable downstream analysis and clinical evaluation of coronary artery disease.

Problem

• vessel segmentation
• X-ray coronary angiography
• vascular connectivity
• small branches
• quantitative coronary analysis

Innovation

• BSC-Net
• small-vessel representation
• vascular structural continuity
• long-range contextual modeling
• Edge-Informed Loss