RefTr: Recurrent Refinement of Confluent Trajectories for 3D Vascular Tree Centerlines

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Naeem, Roman, Hagerman, David, Alvén, Jennifer, Kahl, Fredrik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Naeem, Roman
Hagerman, David
Alvén, Jennifer
Kahl, Fredrik
author_facet Naeem, Roman
Hagerman, David
Alvén, Jennifer
Kahl, Fredrik
contents Tubular tree structures such as blood vessels and lung airways are central to many clinical tasks, including diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical navigation. Accurate centerline extraction with correct topology is essential, as missing small branches can lead to incomplete assessments or overlooked abnormalities. We propose RefTr, a 3D image-to-graph framework that generates vascular centerlines via recurrent refinement of confluent trajectories. RefTr adopts a Transformer-based Producer-Refiner architecture in which the Producer predicts candidate trajectories and a shared Refiner iteratively refines them toward the target branches. The confluent trajectory representation enables whole-branch refinement while explicitly enforcing valid topology. This recurrent scheme improves precision and reduces decoder parameters by 2.4x compared to the state-of-the-art. We further introduce an efficient non-maximum suppression algorithm for spatial tree graphs to merge duplicate branches and extend evaluation metrics to be radius-aware for robust comparison. Experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate stronger overall performance, faster inference, and substantially fewer parameters, highlighting the effectiveness of RefTr for 3D vascular tree analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20823
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RefTr: Recurrent Refinement of Confluent Trajectories for 3D Vascular Tree Centerlines
Naeem, Roman
Hagerman, David
Alvén, Jennifer
Kahl, Fredrik
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Tubular tree structures such as blood vessels and lung airways are central to many clinical tasks, including diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical navigation. Accurate centerline extraction with correct topology is essential, as missing small branches can lead to incomplete assessments or overlooked abnormalities. We propose RefTr, a 3D image-to-graph framework that generates vascular centerlines via recurrent refinement of confluent trajectories. RefTr adopts a Transformer-based Producer-Refiner architecture in which the Producer predicts candidate trajectories and a shared Refiner iteratively refines them toward the target branches. The confluent trajectory representation enables whole-branch refinement while explicitly enforcing valid topology. This recurrent scheme improves precision and reduces decoder parameters by 2.4x compared to the state-of-the-art. We further introduce an efficient non-maximum suppression algorithm for spatial tree graphs to merge duplicate branches and extend evaluation metrics to be radius-aware for robust comparison. Experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate stronger overall performance, faster inference, and substantially fewer parameters, highlighting the effectiveness of RefTr for 3D vascular tree analysis.
title RefTr: Recurrent Refinement of Confluent Trajectories for 3D Vascular Tree Centerlines
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20823