No Arabic abstract
This paper reports Deep LOGISMOS approach to 3D tumor segmentation by incorporating boundary information derived from deep contextual learning to LOGISMOS - layered optimal graph image segmentation of multiple objects and surfaces. Accurate and reliable tumor segmentation is essential to tumor growth analysis and treatment selection. A fully convolutional network (FCN), UNet, is first trained using three adjacent 2D patches centered at the tumor, providing contextual UNet segmentation and probability map for each 2D patch. The UNet segmentation is then refined by Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and morphological operations. The refined UNet segmentation is used to provide the initial shape boundary to build a segmentation graph. The cost for each node of the graph is determined by the UNet probability maps. Finally, a max-flow algorithm is employed to find the globally optimal solution thus obtaining the final segmentation. For evaluation, we applied the method to pancreatic tumor segmentation on a dataset of 51 CT scans, among which 30 scans were used for training and 21 for testing. With Deep LOGISMOS, DICE Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Relative Volume Difference (RVD) reached 83.2+-7.8% and 18.6+-17.4% respectively, both are significantly improved (p<0.05) compared with contextual UNet and/or LOGISMOS alone.
Tubular structure segmentation in medical images, e.g., segmenting vessels in CT scans, serves as a vital step in the use of computers to aid in screening early stages of related diseases. But automatic tubular structure segmentation in CT scans is a challenging problem, due to issues such as poor contrast, noise and complicated background. A tubular structure usually has a cylinder-like shape which can be well represented by its skeleton and cross-sectional radii (scales). Inspired by this, we propose a geometry-aware tubular structure segmentation method, Deep Distance Transform (DDT), which combines intuitions from the classical distance transform for skeletonization and modern deep segmentation networks. DDT first learns a multi-task network to predict a segmentation mask for a tubular structure and a distance map. Each value in the map represents the distance from each tubular structure voxel to the tubular structure surface. Then the segmentation mask is refined by leveraging the shape prior reconstructed from the distance map. We apply our DDT on six medical image datasets. The experiments show that (1) DDT can boost tubular structure segmentation performance significantly (e.g., over 13% improvement measured by DSC for pancreatic duct segmentation), and (2) DDT additionally provides a geometrical measurement for a tubular structure, which is important for clinical diagnosis (e.g., the cross-sectional scale of a pancreatic duct can be an indicator for pancreatic cancer).
Lesion segmentation in medical imaging serves as an effective tool for assessing tumor sizes and monitoring changes in growth. However, not only is manual lesion segmentation time-consuming, but it is also expensive and requires expert radiologist knowledge. Therefore many hospitals rely on a loose substitute called response evaluation criteria in solid tumors (RECIST). Although these annotations are far from precise, they are widely used throughout hospitals and are found in their picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). Therefore, these annotations have the potential to serve as a robust yet challenging means of weak supervision for training full lesion segmentation models. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised co-segmentation model that first generates pseudo-masks from the RECIST slices and uses these as training labels for an attention-based convolutional neural network capable of segmenting common lesions from a pair of CT scans. To validate and test the model, we utilize the DeepLesion dataset, an extensive CT-scan lesion dataset that contains 32,735 PACS bookmarked images. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our co-segmentation approach for lesion segmentation with a mean Dice coefficient of 90.3%.
Lesion segmentation on computed tomography (CT) scans is an important step for precisely monitoring changes in lesion/tumor growth. This task, however, is very challenging since manual segmentation is prohibitively time-consuming, expensive, and requires professional knowledge. Current practices rely on an imprecise substitute called response evaluation criteria in solid tumors (RECIST). Although these markers lack detailed information about the lesion regions, they are commonly found in hospitals picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). Thus, these markers have the potential to serve as a powerful source of weak-supervision for 2D lesion segmentation. To approach this problem, this paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) based weakly-supervised lesion segmentation method, which first generates the initial lesion masks from the RECIST measurements and then utilizes co-segmentation to leverage lesion similarities and refine the initial masks. In this work, an attention-based co-segmentation model is adopted due to its ability to learn more discriminative features from a pair of images. Experimental results on the NIH DeepLesion dataset demonstrate that the proposed co-segmentation approach significantly improves lesion segmentation performance, e.g the Dice score increases about 4.0% (from 85.8% to 89.8%).
Segmentation of mandibles in CT scans during virtual surgical planning is crucial for 3D surgical planning in order to obtain a detailed surface representation of the patients bone. Automatic segmentation of mandibles in CT scans is a challenging task due to large variation in their shape and size between individuals. In order to address this challenge we propose a convolutional neural network approach for mandible segmentation in CT scans by considering the continuum of anatomical structures through different planes. The proposed convolutional neural network adopts the architecture of the U-Net and then combines the resulting 2D segmentations from three different planes into a 3D segmentation. We implement such a segmentation approach on 11 neck CT scans and then evaluate the performance. We achieve an average dice coefficient of $ 0.89 $ on two testing mandible segmentation. Experimental results show that our proposed approach for mandible segmentation in CT scans exhibits high accuracy.
This work presents comprehensive results to detect in the early stage the pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs), a group of endocrine tumors arising in the pancreas, which are the second common type of pancreatic cancer, by checking the abdominal CT scans. To the best of our knowledge, this task has not been studied before as a computational task. To provide radiologists with tumor locations, we adopt a segmentation framework to classify CT volumes by checking if at least a sufficient number of voxels is segmented as tumors. To quantitatively analyze our method, we collect and voxelwisely label a new abdominal CT dataset containing $376$ cases with both arterial and venous phases available for each case, in which $228$ cases were diagnosed with PNETs while the remaining $148$ cases are normal, which is currently the largest dataset for PNETs to the best of our knowledge. In order to incorporate rich knowledge of radiologists to our framework, we annotate dilated pancreatic duct as well, which is regarded as the sign of high risk for pancreatic cancer. Quantitatively, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation networks and achieves a sensitivity of $89.47%$ at a specificity of $81.08%$, which indicates a potential direction to achieve a clinical impact related to cancer diagnosis by earlier tumor detection.