Analysis of Tracheobronchial Diverticula Based on Semantic Segmentation of CT Images

Tracheobronchial diverticula (TD) is a common cystic lesion that can be easily neglected; hence accurate and rapid identification is critical for later diagnosis. There is a strong need to automate this diagnostic process because traditional manual observations are time-consuming and laborious. However, most studies have only focused on the case report or listed the relationship between the disease and other physiological indicators, but a few have adopted advanced technologies such as deep learning for automated identification and diagnosis. To fill this gap, this study interpreted TD recognition as semantic segmentation and proposed a novel attention-based network for TD semantic segmentation. Since the area of TD lesion is small and similar to surrounding organs, we designed the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and attention mechanisms, which can efficiently complete the segmentation of TD with robust results. The proposed attention model can selectively gather features from different branches according to the amount of information they contain. Besides, to the best of our knowledge, no public research data is available yet. For efficient network training, we constructed a data set containing 218 TD and related ground truth (GT). We evaluated different models based on the proposed data set, among which the highest MIOU can reach 0.92. The experiments show that our model can outperform state-of-the-art methods, indicating that the deep learning method has great potential for TD recognition.