Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounts for about half of non-communicable diseases. Vessel stenosis in the coronary artery is considered to be the major risk of CVD. Computed tomography angiography (CTA) is one of the widely used noninvasive imaging modalities in coronary artery diagnosis due to its superior image resolution. Clinically, segmentation of coronary arteries is essential for the diagnosis and quantification of coronary artery disease. Recently, a variety of works have been proposed to address this problem. However, on one hand, most works rely on in-house datasets, and only a few works published their datasets to the public which only contain tens of images. On the other hand, their source code have not been published, and most follow-up works have not made comparison with existing works, which makes it difficult to judge the effectiveness of the methods and hinders the further exploration of this challenging yet critical problem in the community. In this paper, we propose a large-scale dataset for coronary artery segmentation on CTA images. In addition, we have implemented a benchmark in which we have tried our best to implement several typical existing methods. Furthermore, we propose a strong baseline method which combines multi-scale patch fusion and two-stage processing to extract the details of vessels. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves better performance than existing works on the proposed large-scale dataset. The benchmark and the dataset are published at https://github.com/XiaoweiXu/ImageCAS-A-Large-Scale-Dataset-and-Benchmark-for-Coronary-Artery-Segmentation-based-on-CT.

Cloud based medical image analysis has become popular recently due to the high computation complexities of various deep neural network (DNN) based frameworks and the increasingly large volume of medical images that need to be processed. It has been demonstrated that for medical images the transmission from local to clouds is much more expensive than the computation in the clouds itself. Towards this, 3D image compression techniques have been widely applied to reduce the data traffic. However, most of the existing image compression techniques are developed around human vision, i.e., they are designed to minimize distortions that can be perceived by human eyes. In this paper we will use deep learning based medical image segmentation as a vehicle and demonstrate that interestingly, machine and human view the compression quality differently. Medical images compressed with good quality w.r.t. human vision may result in inferior segmentation accuracy. We then design a machine vision oriented 3D image compression framework tailored for segmentation using DNNs. Our method automatically extracts and retains image features that are most important to the segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on widely adopted segmentation frameworks with HVSMR 2016 challenge dataset show that our method can achieve significantly higher segmentation accuracy at the same compression rate, or much better compression rate under the same segmentation accuracy, when compared with the existing JPEG 2000 method. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first machine vision guided medical image compression framework for segmentation in the clouds.