Objective: Herein, a neural network-based liver segmentation algorithm is proposed, and its performance was evaluated using abdominal computed tomography (CT) images. Methods: A fully convolutional network was developed to overcome the volumetric image segmentation problem. To guide a neural network to accurately delineate a target liver object, the network was deeply supervised by applying the adaptive self-supervision scheme to derive the essential contour, which acted as a complement with the global shape. The discriminative contour, shape, and deep features were internally merged for the segmentation results. Results and Conclusion: 160 abdominal CT images were used for training and validation. The quantitative evaluation of the proposed network was performed through an eight-fold cross-validation. The result showed that the method, which uses the contour feature, segmented the liver more accurately than the state-of-the-art with a 2.13 improvement in the dice score. Significance: In this study, a new framework was introduced to guide a neural network and learn complementary contour features. The proposed neural network demonstrates that the guided contour features can significantly improve the performance of the segmentation task.
Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections&#x2014;one between each layer and its subsequent layer&#x2014;our network has L(L+1) 2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https: github.com liuzhuang13 DenseNet.  Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been recently employed to solve problems from both the computer vision and medical image analysis fields. Despite their popularity, most approaches are only able to process 2D images while most medical data used in clinical practice consists of 3D volumes. In this work we propose an approach to 3D image segmentation based on a volumetric, fully convolutional, neural network. Our CNN is trained end-to-end on MRI volumes depicting prostate, and learns to predict segmentation for the whole volume at once. We introduce a novel objective function, that we optimise during training, based on Dice coefficient. In this way we can deal with situations where there is a strong imbalance between the number of foreground and background voxels. To cope with the limited number of annotated volumes available for training, we augment the data applying random non-linear transformations and histogram matching. We show in our experimental evaluation that our approach achieves good performances on challenging test data while requiring only a fraction of the processing time needed by other previous methods. We propose deeply-supervised nets (DSN), a method that simultaneously minimizes classication error and improves the directness and transparency of the hidden layer learning process. We focus our attention on three aspects of traditional convolutional-neuralnetwork-type (CNN-type) architectures: (1) transparency in the eect intermediate layers have on overall classication; (2) discriminativeness and robustness of learned features, especially in early layers; (3) training effectiveness in the face of " gradients. To combat these issues, we introduce " objective functions at each hidden layer, in addition to the overall objective function at the output layer (an integrated strategy distinct from layer-wise pretraining). We also analyze our algorithm using techniques extended from stochastic gradient methods. The advantages provided by our method are evident in our experimental results, showing state-of-the-art performance on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN.