학술논문

ASSIST‐U: A system for segmentation and image style transfer for ureteroscopy
Document Type
article
Source
Healthcare Technology Letters, Vol 11, Iss 2-3, Pp 40-47 (2024)
Subject
computerised tomography
computer vision
data visualisation
endoscopes
image segmentation
Medical technology
R855-855.5
Language
English
ISSN
2053-3713
Abstract
Abstract Kidney stones require surgical removal when they grow too large to be broken up externally or to pass on their own. Upper tract urothelial carcinoma is also sometimes treated endoscopically in a similar procedure. These surgeries are difficult, particularly for trainees who often miss tumours, stones or stone fragments, requiring re‐operation. Furthermore, there are no patient‐specific simulators to facilitate training or standardized visualization tools for ureteroscopy despite its high prevalence. Here a system ASSIST‐U is proposed to create realistic ureteroscopy images and videos solely using preoperative computerized tomography (CT) images to address these unmet needs. A 3D UNet model is trained to automatically segment CT images and construct 3D surfaces. These surfaces are then skeletonized for rendering. Finally, a style transfer model is trained using contrastive unpaired translation (CUT) to synthesize realistic ureteroscopy images. Cross validation on the CT segmentation model achieved a Dice score of 0.853 ± 0.084. CUT style transfer produced visually plausible images; the kernel inception distance to real ureteroscopy images was reduced from 0.198 (rendered) to 0.089 (synthesized). The entire pipeline from CT to synthesized ureteroscopy is also qualitatively demonstrated. The proposed ASSIST‐U system shows promise for aiding surgeons in the visualization of kidney ureteroscopy.