Background/Objectives: Ascending aortic (AA) dilation (diameter ≥ 4.0 cm) is a significant risk factor for aortic dissection, yet it often goes unnoticed in routine chest CT scans performed for other indications. This study aimed to develop and evaluate a deep learning pipeline for automated AA segmentation using non-ECG-gated chest CT scans. Methods: We designed a two-stage pipeline integrating a convolutional neural network (CNN) for focus-slice classification and a U-Net-based segmentation model to extract the aortic region. The model was trained and validated on a dataset of 500 non-ECG-gated chest CT scans, encompassing over 50,000 individual slices. Results: On the held-out test set (10%), the model achieved a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) score of 99.21%, an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 98.45%, and a focus-slice classification accuracy of 98.18%. Compared with traditional rule-based and prior CNN-based methods, the proposed approach achieved markedly higher overlap metrics while maintaining low computational overhead. Conclusions: A lightweight CNN+U-Net deep learning model can enhance diagnostic accuracy, reduce radiologist workload, and enable opportunistic detection of AA dilation in routine chest CT imaging.
Keywords: CNN; U-Net; aortic dilation; deep learning; non-ECG-gated CT.