# Structure and position-aware graph neural network for airway labeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04532 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04532/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Simple and Deep Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02133/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00982/) (2020)
- [On the Bottleneck of Graph Neural Networks and its Practical Implications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05205/) (2020)
- [Graph Neural Networks with Learnable Structural and Positional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07875/) (2021)
- [Towards Deeper Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09296/) (2020)
- [Local Relation Networks for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11491/) (2019)
- [Position-aware Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04817/) (2019)
- [Optimization of Graph Neural Networks: Implicit Acceleration by Skip Connections and More Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04550/) (2021)
- [Deep Vessel Segmentation By Learning Graphical Connectivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02279/) (2018)
- [A joint 3D UNet-Graph Neural Network-based method for Airway Segmentation from chest CTs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08588/) (2019)
- [Relational Modeling for Robust and Efficient Pulmonary Lobe Segmentation in CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07443/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Multi-site, Multi-domain Airway Tree Modeling (ATM'22): A Public Benchmark for Pulmonary Airway Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05745/) (2023)
- [Efficient Anatomical Labeling of Pulmonary Tree Structures via Deep Point-Graph Representation-based Implicit Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17329/) (2023)
- [PANS: Probabilistic Airway Navigation System for Real-time Robust Bronchoscope Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05554/) (2024)
- [Leptomeningeal Collateral Detection on DSA via Vessel-Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14828/) (2026)
- [Learning Topology-Aware Implicit Field for Unified Pulmonary Tree Modeling with Incomplete Topological Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02186/) (2026)
- [BifDet: A 3D Bifurcation Detection Dataset for Airway-Tree Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24999/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel graph-based approach for labeling the anatomical branches of a given airway tree segmentation. The proposed method formulates airway labeling as a branch classification problem in the airway tree graph, where branch features are extracted using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and enriched using graph neural networks. Our graph neural network is structure-aware by having each node aggregate information from its local neighbors and position-aware by encoding node positions in the graph. We evaluated the proposed method on 220 airway trees from subjects with various severity stages of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). The results demonstrate that our approach is computationally efficient and significantly improves branch classification performance than the baseline method. The overall average accuracy of our method reaches 91.18% for labeling all 18 segmental airway branches, compared to 83.83% obtained by the standard CNN method. We published our source code at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/spgnn. The proposed algorithm is also publicly available at https://grand-challenge.org/algorithms/airway-anatomical-labeling/.