Fitting tree model with CNN and geodesics to track vesselsand
  application to Ultrasound Localization Microscopy data
Théo Bertrand Laurent D. Cohen
Segmentation of tubular structures in vascular imaging is a well studied
task, although it is rare that we try to infuse knowledge of the tree-like
structure of the regions to be detected. Our work focuses on detecting the
important landmarks in the vascular network (via CNN performing both
localization and classification of the points of interest) and representing
vessels as the edges in some minimal distance tree graph. We leverage geodesic
methods relevant to the detection of vessels and their geometry, making use of
the space of positions and orientations so that 2D vessels can be accurately
represented as trees. We build our model to carry tracking on Ultrasound
Localization Microscopy (ULM) data, proposing to build a good cost function for
tracking on this type of data. We also test our framework on synthetic and eye
fundus data. Results show that scarcity of well annotated ULM data is an
obstacle to localization of vascular landmarks but the Orientation Score built
from ULM data yields good geodesics for tracking blood vessels.