Quantitative Measurement of White Matter Hyperintensities in Brain MRI using a Multimodal Boundary-Aware Dual-Task Segmentation Framework

White matter hyperintensity (WMH) subtype segmentation in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion sizes, indistinct boundaries, and severe class imbalance. We propose a multimodal boundary-aware dual-task U-Net for segmenting periventricular (PVWMH), deep (DWMH), and subcortical (SWMH) lesions. The framework integrates FLAIR-T1-weighted feature fusion, Vision Mamba-based feature modeling, an SWMH-specific boundary loss, and auxiliary boundary detection. The method was evaluated using patient-level five-fold cross-validation on a private multicenter cohort (n = 75) and separately on 60 publicly annotated MICCAI WMH Challenge subjects for binary segmentation. On the private cohort, the proposed framework achieved an overall Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.6081 and a 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95) of 14.80 mm, compared with 0.5638 and 18.25 mm for the FLAIR-only ablation baseline. It also improved SWMH DSC from 0.4610 with nnU-Net to 0.5215 (p = 0.008). On the public dataset, the mean binary DSC and HD95 were 0.6812 and 12.91 mm, respectively.Given the relatively large through-plane voxel spacing (8.4 mm), the framework processes 2D axial slices independently and does not explicitly model inter-slice context, which may limit its ability to characterize lesions extending across adjacent slices.

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Publication Details

Journal
Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express
Published
2026-10-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1088/2057-1976/aeb9e2
Primary Topic
Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
Type
article
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article

Quantitative Measurement of White Matter Hyperintensities in Brain MRI using a Multimodal Boundary-Aware Dual-Task Segmentation Framework

Shihan Yao, Chao Huang, Long Wang, Yuying Zhang et al.
3 links
Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express
Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
article

Quantitative Measurement of White Matter Hyperintensities in Brain MRI using a Multimodal Boundary-Aware Dual-Task Segmentation Framework

Shihan Yao, Chao Huang, Long Wang, Yuying Zhang, Jinjie Liu
article en

Abstract

White matter hyperintensity (WMH) subtype segmentation in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion sizes, indistinct boundaries, and severe class imbalance. We propose a multimodal boundary-aware dual-task U-Net for segmenting periventricular (PVWMH), deep (DWMH), and subcortical (SWMH) lesions. The framework integrates FLAIR-T1-weighted feature fusion, Vision Mamba-based feature modeling, an SWMH-specific boundary loss, and auxiliary boundary detection. The method was evaluated using patient-level five-fold cross-validation on a private multicenter cohort (n = 75) and separately on 60 publicly annotated MICCAI WMH Challenge subjects for binary segmentation. On the private cohort, the proposed framework achieved an overall Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.6081 and a 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95) of 14.80 mm, compared with 0.5638 and 18.25 mm for the FLAIR-only ablation baseline. It also improved SWMH DSC from 0.4610 with nnU-Net to 0.5215 (p = 0.008). On the public dataset, the mean binary DSC and HD95 were 0.6812 and 12.91 mm, respectively.Given the relatively large through-plane voxel spacing (8.4 mm), the framework processes 2D axial slices independently and does not explicitly model inter-slice context, which may limit its ability to characterize lesions extending across adjacent slices.

Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express
Dalian University of Technology (CN), University of Science and Technology Beijing (CN)
Good health and well-being
Openalex Percentile: Top 17%
Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
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Quantitative Measurement of White Matter Hyperintensities in Brain MRI using a Multimodal Boundary-Aware Dual-Task Segmentation Framework — Shihan Yao, Chao Huang, et al. · Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS