CTG-Net: an efficient cascaded framework driven by terminal guidance mechanism for dilated pancreatic duct segmentation

Pancreatic duct dilation indicates a high risk of various pancreatic diseases. Segmentation for dilated pancreatic duct (DPD) on computed tomography (CT) image shows the potential to assist the early diagnosis, surgical planning and prognosis. Because of the DPD's tiny size, slender tubular structure and the surrounding distractions, most current researches on DPD segmentation achieve low accuracy and always have segmentation errors on the terminal DPD regions. To address these problems, we propose a cascaded terminal guidance network to efficiently improve the DPD segmentation performance. Firstly, a basic cascaded segmentation architecture is established to get the pancreas and coarse DPD segmentation, a DPD graph structure is build on the coarse DPD segmentation to locate the terminal DPD regions. Then, a terminal anatomy attention module is introduced for jointly learning the local intensity from the CT images, feature cues from the coarse DPD segmentation and global anatomy information from the designed pancreas anatomy-aware maps. Finally, a terminal distraction attention module which explicitly learns the distribution of the terminal distraction regions is proposed to reduce the false positive and false negative predictions. We also propose a new metric called tDice to measure the terminal segmentation accuracy for targets with tubular structures and two other metrics for segmentation error evaluation. We collect our dilated pancreatic duct segmentation dataset with 150 CT scans from patients with five types of pancreatic tumors. Experimental results on our dataset show that our proposed approach boosts DPD segmentation accuracy by nearly 20% compared with the existing results, and achieves more than 9% improvement for the terminal segmentation accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods.