Automatic Carotid Artery Detection Using Attention Layer Region-Based Convolution Neural Network

Localization of vessel Region of Interest (ROI) from medical images provides an interactive approach that can assist doctors in evaluating carotid artery diseases. Accurate vessel detection is a prerequisite for the following procedures, like wall segmentation, plaque identification and 3D reconstruction. Deep learning models such as CNN have been widely used in medical image processing, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Faster R-CNN is one of the most representative and successful methods for object detection. Using outputs of feature maps in different layers has been proved to be a useful way to improve the detection performance, however, the common method is to ensemble outputs of different layers directly, and the special characteristic and different importance of each layer haven’t been considered. In this work, we introduce a new network named Attention Layer R-CNN(AL R-CNN) and use it for automatic carotid artery detection, in which we integrate a new module named Attention Layer Part (ALP) into a basic Faster R-CNN system for better assembling feature maps of different layers. Experimental results on carotid dataset show that our method surpasses other state-of-the-art object detection systems.