ExpTopo: Explicit Topological Modeling for Bronchus Segmentation

Airway extraction is paramount in the early diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. As a tree-like structure, both topological-aware learning and voxel-wise classification are equally crucial for the airway. However, existing methods demonstrate insufficient topological learning, emphasizing only the supervision of individual key topological points. Consequently, this paper proposes a Explicit Topological Modeling (ExpTopo) approach to aid airway segmentation. It explicitly introduces topological metric space learning based on semantic segmentation, enhancing the model's structural perception by implementing global skeleton-level sparse topological learning (STL) and local voxel-level dense topological perception (DTP). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves competitive performance at both the topological and voxel levels. Code will be available in https://github.com/MorineZ/ExpTopo.