To address the challenges faced by current brain midline segmentation techniques, such as insufficient accuracy and poor segmentation continuity, this paper proposes a deep learning network model based on a two-stage framework. On the first stage of the model, prior knowledge of the feature consistency of adjacent brain midline slices under normal and pathological conditions is utilized. Associated midline slices are selected through slice similarity analysis, and a novel feature weighting strategy is adopted to collaboratively fuse the overall change characteristics and spatial information of these associated slices, thereby enhancing the feature representation of the brain midline in the intracranial region. On the second stage, the optimal path search strategy for the brain midline is employed based on the network output probability map, which effectively addresses the problem of discontinuous midline segmentation. The method proposed in this paper achieved satisfactory results on the CQ500 dataset provided by the Center for Advanced Research in Imaging, Neurosciences and Genomics, New Delhi, India. The Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff distance (HD), average symmetric surface distance (ASSD), and normalized surface Dice (NSD) were 67.38 ± 10.49, 24.22 ± 24.84, 1.33 ± 1.83, and 0.82 ± 0.09, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can fully utilize the prior knowledge of medical images to effectively achieve accurate segmentation of the brain midline, providing valuable assistance for subsequent identification of the brain midline by clinicians.
Cross-modal unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer segmentation models trained on a labeled source modality to an unlabeled target modality. However, existing methods often fail to fully exploit shape priors and intermediate feature representations, resulting in limited generalization ability of the model in cross-modal transfer tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a segmentation model based on shape-aware adaptive weighting (SAWS) that enhance the model's ability to perceive the target area and capture global and local information. Specifically, we design a multi-angle strip-shaped shape perception (MSSP) module that captures shape features from multiple orientations through an angular pooling strategy, improving structural modeling under cross-modal settings. In addition, an adaptive weighted hierarchical contrastive (AWHC) loss is introduced to fully leverage intermediate features and enhance segmentation accuracy for small target structures. The proposed method is evaluated on the multi-modality whole heart segmentation (MMWHS) dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that SAWS achieves superior performance in cross-modal cardiac segmentation tasks, with a Dice score (Dice) of 70.1% and an average symmetric surface distance (ASSD) of 4.0 for the computed tomography (CT)→magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) task, and a Dice of 83.8% and ASSD of 3.7 for the MRI→CT task, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Overall, this study proposes a cross-modal medical image segmentation method with shape-aware, which effectively improves the structure-aware ability and generalization performance of the UDA model.
