[Reinforcement learning-based method for type B aortic dissection localization]

In the segmentation of aortic dissection, there are issues such as low contrast between the aortic dissection and surrounding organs and vessels, significant differences in dissection morphology, and high background noise. To address these issues, this paper proposed a reinforcement learning-based method for type B aortic dissection localization. With the assistance of a two-stage segmentation model, the deep reinforcement learning was utilized to perform the first-stage aortic dissection localization task, ensuring the integrity of the localization target. In the second stage, the coarse segmentation results from the first stage were used as input to obtain refined segmentation results. To improve the recall rate of the first-stage segmentation results and include the segmentation target more completely in the localization results, this paper designed a reinforcement learning reward function based on the direction of recall changes. Additionally, the localization window was separated from the field of view window to reduce the occurrence of segmentation target loss. Unet, TransUnet, SwinUnet, and MT-Unet were selected as benchmark segmentation models. Through experiments, it was verified that the majority of the metrics in the two-stage segmentation process of this paper performed better than the benchmark results. Specifically, the Dice index improved by 1.34%, 0.89%, 27.66%, and 7.37% for each respective model. In conclusion, by incorporating the type B aortic dissection localization method proposed in this paper into the segmentation process, the overall segmentation accuracy is improved compared to the benchmark models. The improvement is particularly significant for models with poorer segmentation performance.