Fully automatic four-module deep learning pipeline for identifying, segmenting, and Stanford-subtyping aortic dissection (AD) from CT angiography (CTA). A 3D full-resolution nnU-Net first segments the aorta; the segmented boundary is then multi-view projected for AD identification; for AD-positive cases, a second 3D nnU-Net segments the true lumen (TL) and false lumen (FL); finally, a classifier performs Stanford subtyping from multi-view maximum-density projections of the TL/FL. On 386 CTA scans, the pipeline achieved 0.979 accuracy for AD identification, Dice of 0.968 (TL) and 0.971 (FL) for lumen segmentation, and 0.990 accuracy for Stanford subtyping.

Cross-modality cardiac image segmentation model that addresses spatial-temporal confounding -- where the anatomy and imaging-modality elements of cardiac images are intertwined across space and time. DCL performs multi-dimensional causal intervention, modeling causal relationships between images and labels as well as causality along the time and space dimensions, integrating historical optimal interventions to transfer knowledge across temporal contexts. A diffusion mechanism further keeps extracted anatomical elements causally invariant across modalities. On cross-modality cardiac images (MR, CT, and ultrasound), DCL achieved a mean Dice of 0.951, outperforming other advanced segmentation methods.

Automatic coronary artery segmentation pipeline for coronary CT angiography (CCTA). A 2D DenseNet classifier first screens out CT slices that don't contain coronary artery, then a 3D-UNet -- enhanced with dense blocks in the encoder for richer feature extraction and residual, feature-rectifying blocks in the decoder -- segments the coronary artery tree in the remaining slices. A Gaussian-weighted merging scheme combines overlapping 3D patch predictions, up-weighting the more reliable predictions near each patch's center. On the authors' in-house CCTA dataset, the method achieved a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.826.

Deep learning model for multi-class 3D segmentation of the aorta and its thirteen branches from CT angiography, intended to support planning of endovascular aortic interventions. CIS-UNet combines a CNN encoder with a symmetric decoder and a novel Context-aware Shifted Window Self-Attention (CSW-SA) bottleneck block that adapts the Swin transformer's patch-merging mechanism to more efficiently capture global spatial context. Trained and evaluated via 4-fold cross-validation on the first public multi-branch aorta CTA dataset (59 patients), CIS-UNet outperformed the state-of-the-art SwinUNETR baseline, achieving a mean Dice of 0.713 vs. 0.697 and mean surface distance of 2.78mm vs. 3.39mm, while being more computationally efficient.

nnU-Net-based pipeline for automated detection and sub-classification of acute thoracic aortic dissection (AD) on heterogeneous CT imaging, formulated as a semantic segmentation task rather than direct image classification. The model segments the false lumen (ascending and descending) and the dissection membrane -- along with optional indirect signs such as hemopericardium, aortic wall hematoma, and supra-aortic branch dissection -- and a patient is classified as AD-positive if at least two of the three primary segmented regions exceed a volume threshold tuned via Youden's index; the same pipeline additionally flags Stanford type A dissections. Trained on 157 heterogeneous internal CT studies (not restricted to a single contrast protocol) from Mannheim University Medical Centre and evaluated on an internal held-out test set as well as public external datasets (ImageTBAD and AVT), the model reached an AUROC of 98.7% internally and 97.0% externally, and correctly flagged 93.3% of dissection cases that had not been clinically suspected before imaging. The authors state the trained network will be made publicly available as a non-medical device for further scientific research.

Two-stage convolutional neural network that automatically detects and anatomically labels coronary artery, thoracic aorta, and cardiac-valve calcifications in low-dose chest CT acquired for lung-cancer screening. A first CNN with a large receptive field (via dilated convolutions) identifies and anatomically labels candidate calcifications; a second CNN filters true positives from the candidates. Trained and evaluated on 1,744 CT scans from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), reaching an F1 of 0.89 (soft-filter reconstructions) / 0.84 (sharp-filter reconstructions) for coronary artery calcifications and a linearly-weighted kappa of 0.90-0.91 for per-subject cardiovascular risk categorization versus the manual reference standard.

Deep learning pipeline for detection and quantification of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) -- a typically asymptomatic condition often missed incidentally by radiologists -- from abdominal-pelvic CT. A modified 3D U-Net segments the aorta on both contrast and non-contrast CT volumes with a variable number of images, after which an ellipse-fitting post-processing step measures the aortic cross-sectional diameter along the vessel to detect aneurysmal dilation. Trained and validated on 321 abdominal-pelvic CT examinations from Massachusetts General Hospital, the model reached a sensitivity/specificity of 0.91/0.95 on the primary validation set, and 0.85/1.0 on a separate 57-exam generalization test set with different patient demographics and acquisition characteristics; the authors report that DeepAAA exceeded literature-reported radiologist performance for incidental AAA detection.

U-Net-variant segmentation model that identifies and quantifies coronary artery calcium (CAC) directly from routine non-gated, non-contrast chest CT scans -- the kind ordered for lung-cancer screening or unrelated indications rather than a dedicated cardiac scan -- so that the tens of millions of such scans performed annually can be opportunistically screened for cardiovascular risk without any extra imaging. Predicted calcium masks are combined with the CT's Hounsfield units to compute an Agatston-equivalent score. Trained on 446 expert-segmented scans from 98 medical centers across the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs national health system (capturing substantial heterogeneity in scanners and protocols) and benchmarked against 795 patients with a paired same-year gated CAC study: nongated AI-CAC differentiates zero-vs-nonzero and <100-vs->=100 Agatston categories with 89.4% (F1 0.93) and 87.3% (F1 0.89) accuracy respectively, and its score stratifies 10-year all-cause mortality (CAC 0 vs. >400: 25.4% vs. 60.2%, hazard ratio 3.49) and composite stroke/MI/death risk (33.5% vs. 63.8%, hazard ratio 3.00). In a simulated opportunistic-screening run across 8,052 low-dose CT scans, cardiologists confirmed 99.2% of patients flagged with AI-CAC >400 would benefit from lipid-lowering therapy. Code and trained model weights are both public under an MIT license.

Largest federated cardiac CT analysis to date (n=8,104 scans) across a real-world federation of German university hospitals, addressing partially-labeled data across sites via a two-step semi-supervised knowledge-distillation strategy: task-specific CNNs first predict on unlabeled data per label type, then a SWIN-UNETR transformer learns from these predictions with label-specific heads. Learns a single federated model that simultaneously predicts TAVI-relevant landmarks (aortic hinge points, coronary ostia, membranous septum) and calcification from cardiac CT, improving generalizability over UNet-based baselines on downstream tasks.

Fully automatic pipeline that localizes the heart, segments coronary calcium, and produces an Agatston-style coronary artery calcium score from gated and non-gated chest/cardiac CT. A three-stage 3D CNN performs each step in sequence. Validated across the Framingham, NLST, PROMISE, and ROMICAT-II cohorts, where the resulting calcium score predicted cardiovascular events with hazard ratios up to 4.3. Developed by the Harvard AIM Lab.

3D CNN that segments seven cardiac substructures - both ventricles, both atria, the LV myocardium, ascending aorta, and pulmonary artery trunk - from cardiac CT angiography. Trained with a hybrid loss function combining multiple segmentation objectives. Developed at CUHK for the MICCAI 2017 Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation (MM-WHS) challenge.