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Main Authors: Gao, Zhuangzhi, Zhou, Feixiang, Zhao, He, Chen, Xiuju, Li, Xiaoxin, Yu, Qinkai, Zhao, Yitian, Shantsila, Alena, Lip, Gregory Y. H., Shantsila, Eduard, Zheng, Yalin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18045
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author Gao, Zhuangzhi
Zhou, Feixiang
Zhao, He
Chen, Xiuju
Li, Xiaoxin
Yu, Qinkai
Zhao, Yitian
Shantsila, Alena
Lip, Gregory Y. H.
Shantsila, Eduard
Zheng, Yalin
author_facet Gao, Zhuangzhi
Zhou, Feixiang
Zhao, He
Chen, Xiuju
Li, Xiaoxin
Yu, Qinkai
Zhao, Yitian
Shantsila, Alena
Lip, Gregory Y. H.
Shantsila, Eduard
Zheng, Yalin
contents Segmenting curvilinear structures in medical images is essential for analyzing morphological patterns in clinical applications. Integrating topological properties, such as connectivity, improves segmentation accuracy and consistency. However, extracting and embedding such properties - especially from Persistence Diagrams (PD) - is challenging due to their non-differentiability and computational cost. Existing approaches mostly encode topology through handcrafted loss functions, which generalize poorly across tasks. In this paper, we propose PIs-Regressor, a simple yet effective module that learns persistence image (PI) - finite, differentiable representations of topological features - directly from data. Together with Topology SegNet, which fuses these features in both downsampling and upsampling stages, our framework integrates topology into the network architecture itself rather than auxiliary losses. Unlike existing methods that depend heavily on handcrafted loss functions, our approach directly incorporates topological information into the network structure, leading to more robust segmentation. Our design is flexible and can be seamlessly combined with other topology-based methods to further enhance segmentation performance. Experimental results show that integrating topological features enhances model robustness, effectively handling challenges like overexposure and blurring in medical imaging. Our approach on three curvilinear benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both pixel-level accuracy and topological fidelity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18045
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging Persistence Image to Enhance Robustness and Performance in Curvilinear Structure Segmentation
Gao, Zhuangzhi
Zhou, Feixiang
Zhao, He
Chen, Xiuju
Li, Xiaoxin
Yu, Qinkai
Zhao, Yitian
Shantsila, Alena
Lip, Gregory Y. H.
Shantsila, Eduard
Zheng, Yalin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Segmenting curvilinear structures in medical images is essential for analyzing morphological patterns in clinical applications. Integrating topological properties, such as connectivity, improves segmentation accuracy and consistency. However, extracting and embedding such properties - especially from Persistence Diagrams (PD) - is challenging due to their non-differentiability and computational cost. Existing approaches mostly encode topology through handcrafted loss functions, which generalize poorly across tasks. In this paper, we propose PIs-Regressor, a simple yet effective module that learns persistence image (PI) - finite, differentiable representations of topological features - directly from data. Together with Topology SegNet, which fuses these features in both downsampling and upsampling stages, our framework integrates topology into the network architecture itself rather than auxiliary losses. Unlike existing methods that depend heavily on handcrafted loss functions, our approach directly incorporates topological information into the network structure, leading to more robust segmentation. Our design is flexible and can be seamlessly combined with other topology-based methods to further enhance segmentation performance. Experimental results show that integrating topological features enhances model robustness, effectively handling challenges like overexposure and blurring in medical imaging. Our approach on three curvilinear benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both pixel-level accuracy and topological fidelity.
title Leveraging Persistence Image to Enhance Robustness and Performance in Curvilinear Structure Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18045