Pancreatic duct centerline extraction for image unfolding in photon-counting CT

Tan JY, Rist L, Ayala Hernandez A, Sühling M, Brandt EGS, Maier A, Taubmann O (2025)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2025

Journal

Computers & Graphics Elsevier

Book Volume: 133

Article Number: 104426

DOI: 10.1016/j.cag.2025.104426

Abstract

Pancreatic diseases are often only diagnosed at a late stage, and pancreatic cancer is the most feared due to a very high mortality. Abnormalities of the main pancreatic duct, such as blockages and dilatation, are often (early) signs of such pancreatic diseases, but are difficult to detect in standard Computed Tomography image series. Photon-Counting Computed Tomography with its higher resolution improves the detectability of this duct, allowing diagnostic assessment. A comprehensive visualization in a single view requires a centerline-based unfolding of the duct and pancreas. However, manual centerline annotation is tedious. To automate this process, we introduce a fully automated pipeline for pancreatic duct unfolding by robustly extracting the centerline using Dijkstra’s algorithm on a cost map derived from a segmentation probability map. The core contribution of this work lies in the processing of the data-driven cost map leading to a consistent centerline for generating CPR visualizations of the pancreas. To improve individual steps within the pipeline, we investigate further enhancements such as segmentation filtering and the topology-preserving skeleton recall loss. In the evaluation, we assess performance of our method on both ultra-high-resolution and regular PCCT images. We find that the centerline can be consistently extracted from both scan types, where the centerlines from the ultra-high resolution images exhibit a slightly lower median error of 0.58 mm compared to the 0.73 mm using the regular resolution.

Authors with CRIS profile

Leonhard Rist Lehrstuhl für Informatik 5 (Mustererkennung) Andreas Maier Lehrstuhl für Informatik 5 (Mustererkennung)

Involved external institutions

Siemens Healthineers DE Germany (DE) Gentofte Hospital DK Denmark (DK)

How to cite

APA:

Tan, J.Y., Rist, L., Ayala Hernandez, A., Sühling, M., Brandt, E.G.S., Maier, A., & Taubmann, O. (2025). Pancreatic duct centerline extraction for image unfolding in photon-counting CT. Computers & Graphics, 133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2025.104426

MLA:

Tan, Jie Yi, et al. "Pancreatic duct centerline extraction for image unfolding in photon-counting CT." Computers & Graphics 133 (2025).

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