Vesseg An Open-Source Tool For Deep Learning-Based Atherosclerotic Plaque Quantification In Histopathology Images-Brief Report

OBJECTIVE: Manual plaque segmentation in microscopy images is a time-consuming process in atherosclerosis research and potentially subject to unacceptable user-to-user variability and observer bias. We address this by releasing Vesseg a tool that includes state-of-the-art deep learning models for atherosclerotic plaque segmentation.APPROACH AND RESULTS: Vesseg is a containerized, extensible, open-source, and user-oriented tool. It includes 2 models, trained and tested on 1089 hematoxylin-eosin stained mouse model atherosclerotic brachiocephalic artery sections. The models were compared to 3 human raters. Vesseg can be accessed at .online or downloaded. The models show mean Soerensen-Dice scores of 0.91 +/- 0.15 for plaque and 0.97 +/- 0.08 for lumen pixels. The mean accuracy is 0.98 +/- 0.05. Vesseg is already in active use, generating time savings of >10 minutes per slide.CONCLUSIONS: Vesseg brings state-of-the-art deep learning methods to atherosclerosis research, providing drastic time savings, while allowing for continuous improvement of models and the underlying pipeline.