The segmentation of pancreas is important for medical image analysis, yet it faces great challenges of class imbalance, background distractions, and non-rigid geometrical features. To address these difficulties, we introduce a deep Q network (DQN) driven approach with deformable U-Net to accurately segment the pancreas by explicitly interacting with contextual information and extract anisotropic features from pancreas. The DQN-based model learns a context-adaptive localization policy to produce a visually tightened and precise localization bounding box of the pancreas. Furthermore, deformable U-Net captures geometry-aware information of pancreas by learning geometrically deformable filters for feature extraction. The experiments on NIH dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in pancreas segmentation.
Pancreas Segmentation is one of the hot topics in Medical Image Segmentation, which also includes substructures such as vessel @cite_28 and leision @cite_29 @cite_21 . Deep learning has been widely used in the medical segmentation domain. @cite_18 proposes a registration-free deep learning based segmentation algorithm to segment eight organs including pancreas. @cite_6 proposes a hybrid densely connected UNet, H-DenseUNet, to segment tumors and livers. @cite_16 present Dense-Res-Inception Net to address the general challenges of medical image segmentation. Pancreas has its own features, in order to deal with great anatomical variability of pancreas, multi-pass structures have been proposed for more accurate segmentation. @cite_8 performed a pre-segmented pancreas proposal generating algorithm followed by a proposal refinement convolutional network. This framework is further improved in @cite_1 by segmentation holistically-nested network. @cite_26 @cite_25 designed convolutional network model to localize and segment the pancreas in cyclic manners. In the proposed model, every segmentation stage takes its last segmented zone as its input, and generate a new segmentation map. @cite_2 propose a successive 3D coarse-to-fine segmentation model, consisting of a coarse segmentation network and a fine segmentation network. The coarse-to-fine model utilizes by-pass structure in ResNet @cite_10 and reaches state-of-the-art mean DSC $84.59 .86
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_2 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_25
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We aim at segmenting small organs (e.g., the pancreas) from abdominal CT scans. As the target often occupies a relatively small region in the input image, deep neural networks can be easily confused by the complex and variable background. To alleviate this, researchers proposed a coarse-to-fine approach, which used prediction from the first (coarse) stage to indicate a smaller input region for the second (fine) stage. Despite its effectiveness, this algorithm dealt with two stages individually, which lacked optimizing a global energy function, and limited its ability to incorporate multi-stage visual cues. Missing contextual information led to unsatisfying convergence in iterations, and that the fine stage sometimes produced even lower segmentation accuracy than the coarse stage. This paper presents a Recurrent Saliency Transformation Network. The key innovation is a saliency transformation module, which repeatedly converts the segmentation probability map from the previous iteration as spatial weights and applies these weights to the current iteration. This brings us two-fold benefits. In training, it allows joint optimization over the deep networks dealing with different input scales. In testing, it propagates multi-stage visual information throughout iterations to improve segmentation accuracy. Experiments in the NIH pancreas segmentation dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy, which outperforms the previous best by an average of over 2 . Much higher accuracies are also reported on several small organs in a larger dataset collected by ourselves. In addition, our approach enjoys better convergence properties, making it more efficient and reliable in practice. Automatic organ segmentation is an important yet challenging problem for medical image analysis. The pancreas is an abdominal organ with very high anatomical variability. This inhibits previous segmentation methods from achieving high accuracies, especially compared to other organs such as the liver, heart or kidneys. In this paper, we present a probabilistic bottom-up approach for pancreas segmentation in abdominal computed tomography CT scans, using multi-level deep convolutional networks ConvNets. We propose and evaluate several variations of deep ConvNets in the context of hierarchical, coarse-to-fine classification on image patches and regions, i.e. superpixels. We first present a dense labeling of local image patches via P-ConvNet and nearest neighbor fusion. Then we describe a regional ConvNet R1-ConvNet that samples a set of bounding boxes around each image superpixel at different scales of contexts in a "zoom-out" fashion. Our ConvNets learn to assign class probabilities for each superpixel region of being pancreas. Last, we study a stacked R2-ConvNet leveraging the joint space of CT intensities and the P-ConvNet dense probability maps. Both 3D Gaussian smoothing and 2D conditional random fields are exploited as structured predictions for post-processing. We evaluate on CT images of [InlineEquation not available: see fulltext.] patients in 4-fold cross-validation. We achieve a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 83.6±6.3 in training and 71.8±10.7 in testing. Automatic organ segmentation is an important yet challenging problem for medical image analysis. The pancreas is an abdominal organ with very high anatomical variability. This inhibits previous segmentation methods from achieving high accuracies, especially compared to other organs such as the liver, heart or kidneys. In this paper, we present a probabilistic bottom-up approach for pancreas segmentation in abdominal computed tomography (CT) scans, using multi-level deep convolutional networks (ConvNets). We propose and evaluate several variations of deep ConvNets in the context of hierarchical, coarse-to-fine classification on image patches and regions, i.e. superpixels. We first present a dense labeling of local image patches via @math and nearest neighbor fusion. Then we describe a regional ConvNet ( @math ) that samples a set of bounding boxes around each image superpixel at different scales of contexts in a "zoom-out" fashion. Our ConvNets learn to assign class probabilities for each superpixel region of being pancreas. Last, we study a stacked @math leveraging the joint space of CT intensities and the @math dense probability maps. Both 3D Gaussian smoothing and 2D conditional random fields are exploited as structured predictions for post-processing. We evaluate on CT images of 82 patients in 4-fold cross-validation. We achieve a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 83.6 @math 6.3 in training and 71.8 @math 10.7 in testing. We aim at segmenting small organs (e.g., the pancreas) from abdominal CT scans. As the target often occupies a relatively small region in the input image, deep neural networks can be easily confused by the complex and variable background. To alleviate this, researchers proposed a coarse-to-fine approach [46], which used prediction from the first (coarse) stage to indicate a smaller input region for the second (fine) stage. Despite its effectiveness, this algorithm dealt with two stages individually, which lacked optimizing a global energy function, and limited its ability to incorporate multi-stage visual cues. Missing contextual information led to unsatisfying convergence in iterations, and that the fine stage sometimes produced even lower segmentation accuracy than the coarse stage. This paper presents a Recurrent Saliency Transformation Network. The key innovation is a saliency transformation module, which repeatedly converts the segmentation probability map from the previous iteration as spatial weights and applies these weights to the current iteration. This brings us two-fold benefits. In training, it allows joint optimization over the deep networks dealing with different input scales. In testing, it propagates multi-stage visual information throughout iterations to improve segmentation accuracy. Experiments in the NIH pancreas segmentation dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy, which outperforms the previous best by an average of over 2 . Much higher accuracies are also reported on several small organs in a larger dataset collected by ourselves. In addition, our approach enjoys better convergence properties, making it more efficient and reliable in practice.