Accurate vessel wall segmentation on black-blood MRI is an important but difficult task. Using previously annotated carotid vessel wall contours by human reviewers, a convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained to predict vessel wall region from the combination of T1-weighted and time-of-flight images. Compared with human segmentation results, the CNN-based model achieved a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.86±0.06 and a correlation coefficient of 0.96 (0.94, 0.97) in measuring vessel wall area. Fast and accurate vessel wall segmentation may help fully realize the potential of vessel wall MRI in monitoring atherosclerosis progression or regression in serial studies and clinical trials.
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