Direct Vascular Territory Segmentation on Cerebral Digital Subtraction Angiography

X-ray digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is frequently used when evaluating minimally invasive medical interventions. DSA predominantly visualizes vessels, and soft tissue anatomy is less visible or invisible in DSA. Visualization of cerebral anatomy could aid physicians during treatment. This study aimed to develop and evaluate a deep learning model to predict vascular territories that are not explicitly visible in DSA imaging acquired during ischemic stroke treatment. We trained an nnUNet model with manually segmented intracranial carotid artery and middle cerebral artery vessel territories on minimal intensity projection DSA acquired during ischemic stroke treatment. We compared the model to a traditional atlas registration model using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and average surface distance (ASD). Additionally, we qualitatively assessed the success rate in both models using an external test. The segmentation model was trained on 1224 acquisitions from 361 patients with ischemic stroke. The segmentation model had a significantly higher DSC (0.96 vs 0.82, p < 0.001) and lower ASD compared to the atlas model (13.8 vs 47.3, p < 0.001). The success rate of the segmentation model (85%) was higher compared to the atlas registration model (66%) in the external test set. A deep learning method for the segmentation of vascular territories without explicit borders on cerebral DSA demonstrated superior accuracy and quality compared to the traditional atlas-based method. This approach has the potential to be applied to other anatomical structures for enhanced visualization during X-ray guided medical procedures. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/RuishengSu/autoTICI.