No Arabic abstract
This paper presents a method for automatic segmentation, localization, and identification of vertebrae in arbitrary 3D CT images. Many previous works do not perform the three tasks simultaneously even though requiring a priori knowledge of which part of the anatomy is visible in the 3D CT images. Our method tackles all these tasks in a single multi-stage framework without any assumptions. In the first stage, we train a 3D Fully Convolutional Networks to find the bounding boxes of the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar vertebrae. In the second stage, we train an iterative 3D Fully Convolutional Networks to segment individual vertebrae in the bounding box. The input to the second networks have an auxiliary channel in addition to the 3D CT images. Given the segmented vertebra regions in the auxiliary channel, the networks output the next vertebra. The proposed method is evaluated in terms of segmentation, localization, and identification accuracy with two public datasets of 15 3D CT images from the MICCAI CSI 2014 workshop challenge and 302 3D CT images with various pathologies introduced in [1]. Our method achieved a mean Dice score of 96%, a mean localization error of 8.3 mm, and a mean identification rate of 84%. In summary, our method achieved better performance than all existing works in all the three metrics.
Automatic segmentation of the liver and hepatic lesions is an important step towards deriving quantitative biomarkers for accurate clinical diagnosis and computer-aided decision support systems. This paper presents a method to automatically segment liver and lesions in CT and MRI abdomen images using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCNs) enabling the segmentation of a large-scale medical trial or quantitative image analysis. We train and cascade two FCNs for a combined segmentation of the liver and its lesions. In the first step, we train a FCN to segment the liver as ROI input for a second FCN. The second FCN solely segments lesions within the predicted liver ROIs of step 1. CFCN models were trained on an abdominal CT dataset comprising 100 hepatic tumor volumes. Validations on further datasets show that CFCN-based semantic liver and lesion segmentation achieves Dice scores over 94% for liver with computation times below 100s per volume. We further experimentally demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method on an 38 MRI liver tumor volumes and the public 3DIRCAD dataset.
Automatic segmentation of the liver and its lesion is an important step towards deriving quantitative biomarkers for accurate clinical diagnosis and computer-aided decision support systems. This paper presents a method to automatically segment liver and lesions in CT abdomen images using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCNs) and dense 3D conditional random fields (CRFs). We train and cascade two FCNs for a combined segmentation of the liver and its lesions. In the first step, we train a FCN to segment the liver as ROI input for a second FCN. The second FCN solely segments lesions from the predicted liver ROIs of step 1. We refine the segmentations of the CFCN using a dense 3D CRF that accounts for both spatial coherence and appearance. CFCN models were trained in a 2-fold cross-validation on the abdominal CT dataset 3DIRCAD comprising 15 hepatic tumor volumes. Our results show that CFCN-based semantic liver and lesion segmentation achieves Dice scores over 94% for liver with computation times below 100s per volume. We experimentally demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method as a decision support system with a high accuracy and speed for usage in daily clinical routine.
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer-related death after lung cancer and breast cancer worldwide. The risk of developing colorectal cancer could be reduced by early diagnosis of polyps during a colonoscopy. Computer-aided diagnosis systems have the potential to be applied for polyp screening and reduce the number of missing polyps. In this paper, we compare the performance of different deep learning architectures as feature extractors, i.e. ResNet, DenseNet, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2 and SE-ResNeXt in the encoder part of a U-Net architecture. We validated the performance of presented ensemble models on the CVC-Clinic (GIANA 2018) dataset. The DenseNet169 feature extractor combined with U-Net architecture outperformed the other counterparts and achieved an accuracy of 99.15%, Dice similarity coefficient of 90.87%, and Jaccard index of 83.82%.
A cascaded multi-planar scheme with a modified residual U-Net architecture was used to segment thalamic nuclei on conventional and white-matter-nulled (WMn) magnetization prepared rapid gradient echo (MPRAGE) data. A single network was optimized to work with images from healthy controls and patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and essential tremor (ET), acquired at both 3T and 7T field strengths. Dice similarity coefficient and volume similarity index (VSI) were used to evaluate performance. Clinical utility was demonstrated by applying this method to study the effect of MS on thalamic nuclei atrophy. Segmentation of each thalamus into twelve nuclei was achieved in under a minute. For 7T WMn-MPRAGE, the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art on patients with ET with statistically significant improvements in Dice for five nuclei (increase in the range of 0.05-0.18) and VSI for four nuclei (increase in the range of 0.05-0.19), while performing comparably for healthy and MS subjects. Dice and VSI achieved using 7T WMn-MPRAGE data are comparable to those using 3T WMn-MPRAGE data. For conventional MPRAGE, the proposed method shows a statistically significant Dice improvement in the range of 0.14-0.63 over FreeSurfer for all nuclei and disease types. Effect of noise on network performance shows robustness to images with SNR as low as half the baseline SNR. Atrophy of four thalamic nuclei and whole thalamus was observed for MS patients compared to healthy control subjects, after controlling for the effect of parallel imaging, intracranial volume, gender, and age (p<0.004). The proposed segmentation method is fast, accurate, performs well across disease types and field strengths, and shows great potential for improving our understanding of thalamic nuclei involvement in neurological diseases.
Accurate segmentation for medical images is important for clinical diagnosis. Existing automatic segmentation methods are mainly based on fully supervised learning and have an extremely high demand for precise annotations, which are very costly and time-consuming to obtain. To address this problem, we proposed an automatic CT segmentation method based on weakly supervised learning, by which one could train an accurate segmentation model only with weak annotations in the form of bounding boxes. The proposed method is composed of two steps: 1) generating pseudo masks with bounding box annotations by k-means clustering, and 2) iteratively training a 3D U-Net convolutional neural network as a segmentation model. Some data pre-processing methods are used to improve performance. The method was validated on four datasets containing three types of organs with a total of 627 CT volumes. For liver, spleen and kidney segmentation, it achieved an accuracy of 95.19%, 92.11%, and 91.45%, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is accurate, efficient, and suitable for clinical use.