# Topology-Preserving Automatic Labeling of Coronary Arteries via Anatomy-aware Connection Classifier

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08987/) (2017)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [clDice -- A Novel Topology-Preserving Loss Function for Tubular Structure Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07311/) (2020)
- [CPR-GCN: Conditional Partial-Residual Graph Convolutional Network in Automated Anatomical Labeling of Coronary Arteries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08560/) (2020)
- [PointScatter: Point Set Representation for Tubular Structure Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05774/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Topologically Faithful Multi-class Segmentation in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11001/) (2024)
- [DeformCL: Learning Deformable Centerline Representation for Vessel Extraction in 3D Medical Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05820/) (2025)
- [LWT-ARTERY-LABEL: A Lightweight Framework for Automated Coronary Artery Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06874/) (2025)
- [Clinical Risk-Aware Multi-Level Grading for Coronary Artery Stenosis through Curved Feature Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic labeling of coronary arteries is an essential task in the practical diagnosis process of cardiovascular diseases. For experienced radiologists, the anatomically predetermined connections are important for labeling the artery segments accurately, while this prior knowledge is barely explored in previous studies. In this paper, we present a new framework called TopoLab which incorporates the anatomical connections into the network design explicitly. Specifically, the strategies of intra-segment feature aggregation and inter-segment feature interaction are introduced for hierarchical segment feature extraction. Moreover, we propose the anatomy-aware connection classifier to enable classification for each connected segment pair, which effectively exploits the prior topology among the arteries with different categories. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we contribute high-quality annotations of artery labeling to the public orCaScore dataset. The experimental results on both the orCaScore dataset and an in-house dataset show that our TopoLab has achieved state-of-the-art performance.