Deep Learning Angiography (DLA): Three-dimensional C-arm Cone Beam CT Angiography Using Deep Learning

Background and Purpose Our purpose was to develop a deep learning angiography (DLA) method to generate 3D cerebral angiograms from a single contrast-enhanced acquisition. Material and Methods Under an approved IRB protocol 105 3D-DSA exams were randomly selected from an internal database. All were acquired using a clinical system (Axiom Artis zee; Siemens Healthineers) in conjunction with a standard injection protocol. More than 150 million labeled voxels from 35 subjects were used for training. A deep convolutional neural network was trained to classify each image voxel into three tissue types (vasculature, bone and soft tissue). The trained DLA model was then applied for tissue classification in a validation cohort of 8 subjects and a final testing cohort consisting of the remaining 62 subjects. The final vasculature tissue class was used to generate the 3D-DLA images. To quantify the generalization error of the trained model, accuracy, sensitivity, precision and F1-scores were calculated for vasculature classification in relevant anatomy. The 3D-DLA and clinical 3D-DSA images were subject to a qualitative assessment for the presence of inter-sweep motion artifacts. Results Vasculature classification accuracy and 95% CI in the testing dataset was 98.7% ([98.3, 99.1] %). No residual signal from osseous structures was observed for all 3D-DLA testing cases except for small regions in the otic capsule and nasal cavity compared to 37% (23/62) of the 3D-DSAs. Conclusion DLA accurately recreated the vascular anatomy of the 3D-DSA reconstructions without mask. DLA reduced mis-registration artifacts induced by inter-sweep motion. DLA reduces radiation exposure required to obtain clinically useful 3D-DSA. Abbreviations DLA – Deep learning angiography CNN – Convolutional Neural Network