# CaRe-CNN: Cascading Refinement CNN for Myocardial Infarct Segmentation with Microvascular Obstructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11315 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11315/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.5778/) (2013)
- [Integrating Spatial Configuration into Heatmap Regression Based CNNs for Landmark Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00748/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning methods for automatic evaluation of delayed enhancement-MRI. The results of the EMIDEC challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04016/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network for Automatic Myocardial Infarction Segmentation from Delayed-Enhancement Cardiac MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14128/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Multi-Source and Multi-Sequence Myocardial Pathology Segmentation Using a Cascading Refinement CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12792/) (2024)
- [LA-CaRe-CNN: Cascading Refinement CNN for Left Atrial Scar Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04553/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is widely established to assess the viability of myocardial tissue of patients after acute myocardial infarction (MI). We propose the Cascading Refinement CNN (CaRe-CNN), which is a fully 3D, end-to-end trained, 3-stage CNN cascade that exploits the hierarchical structure of such labeled cardiac data. Throughout the three stages of the cascade, the label definition changes and CaRe-CNN learns to gradually refine its intermediate predictions accordingly. Furthermore, to obtain more consistent qualitative predictions, we propose a series of post-processing steps that take anatomical constraints into account. Our CaRe-CNN was submitted to the FIMH 2023 MYOSAIQ challenge, where it ranked second out of 18 participating teams. CaRe-CNN showed great improvements most notably when segmenting the difficult but clinically most relevant myocardial infarct tissue (MIT) as well as microvascular obstructions (MVO). When computing the average scores over all labels, our method obtained the best score in eight out of ten metrics. Thus, accurate cardiac segmentation after acute MI via our CaRe-CNN allows generating patient-specific models of the heart serving as an important step towards personalized medicine.