Cardiac image segmentation is a critical process for generating personalized models of the heart and for quantifying cardiac performance parameters. Several convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures have been proposed to segment the heart chambers from cardiac cine MR images. Here we propose a multi-task learning (MTL)-based regularization framework for cardiac MR image segmentation. The network is trained to perform the main task of semantic segmentation, along with a simultaneous, auxiliary task of pixel-wise distance map regression. The proposed distance map regularizer is a decoder network added to the bottleneck layer of an existing CNN architecture, facilitating the network to learn robust global features. The regularizer block is removed after training, so that the original number of network parameters does not change. We show that the proposed regularization method improves both binary and multi-class segmentation performance over the corresponding state-of-the-art CNN architectures on two publicly available cardiac cine MRI datasets, obtaining average dice coefficient of 0.84$\pm$0.03 and 0.91$\pm$0.04, respectively. Furthermore, we also demonstrate improved generalization performance of the distance map regularized network on cross-dataset segmentation, showing as much as 41% improvement in average Dice coefficient from 0.57$\pm$0.28 to 0.80$\pm$0.13.
Deep learning has become the most widely used approach for cardiac image segmentation in recent years. In this paper, we provide a review of over 100 cardiac image segmentation papers using deep learning, which covers common imaging modalities including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and ultrasound (US) and major anatomical structures of interest (ventricles, atria and vessels). In addition, a summary of publicly available cardiac image datasets and code repositories are included to provide a base for encouraging reproducible research. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations with current deep learning-based approaches (scarcity of labels, model generalizability across different domains, interpretability) and suggest potential directions for future research.
In this work, we study the problem of training deep networks for semantic image segmentation using only a fraction of annotated images, which may significantly reduce human annotation efforts. Particularly, we propose a strategy that exploits the unpaired image style transfer capabilities of CycleGAN in semi-supervised segmentation. Unlike recent works using adversarial learning for semi-supervised segmentation, we enforce cycle consistency to learn a bidirectional mapping between unpaired images and segmentation masks. This adds an unsupervised regularization effect that boosts the segmentation performance when annotated data is limited. Experiments on three different public segmentation benchmarks (PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes and ACDC) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed model achieves 2-4% of improvement with respect to the baseline and outperforms recent approaches for this task, particularly in low labeled data regime.
Accurate segmentation of the prostate from magnetic resonance (MR) images provides useful information for prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment. However, automated prostate segmentation from 3D MR images still faces several challenges. For instance, a lack of clear edge between the prostate and other anatomical structures makes it challenging to accurately extract the boundaries. The complex background texture and large variation in size, shape and intensity distribution of the prostate itself make segmentation even further complicated. With deep learning, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), emerging as commonly used methods for medical image segmentation, the difficulty in obtaining large number of annotated medical images for training CNNs has become much more pronounced that ever before. Since large-scale dataset is one of the critical components for the success of deep learning, lack of sufficient training data makes it difficult to fully train complex CNNs. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a boundary-weighted domain adaptive neural network (BOWDA-Net). To make the network more sensitive to the boundaries during segmentation, a boundary-weighted segmentation loss (BWL) is proposed. Furthermore, an advanced boundary-weighted transfer leaning approach is introduced to address the problem of small medical imaging datasets. We evaluate our proposed model on the publicly available MICCAI 2012 Prostate MR Image Segmentation (PROMISE12) challenge dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is more sensitive to boundary information and outperformed other state-of-the-art methods.
Medical image segmentation is a primary task in many applications, and the accuracy of the segmentation is a necessity. Recently, many deep learning networks derived from U-Net have been extensively used and have achieved notable results. To further improve and refine the performance of U-Net, parallel decoders along with mask prediction decoder have been carried out and have shown significant improvement with additional advantages. In our work, we utilize the advantages of using a combination of contour and distance map as regularizers. In turn, we propose a novel architecture Psi-Net with a single encoder and three parallel decoders, one decoder to learn the mask and other two to learn the auxiliary tasks of contour detection and distance map estimation. The learning of these auxiliary tasks helps in capturing the shape and boundary. We also propose a new joint loss function for the proposed architecture. The loss function consists of a weighted combination of Negative likelihood and Mean Square Error loss. We have used two publicly available datasets: 1) Origa dataset for the task of optic cup and disc segmentation and 2) Endovis segment dataset for the task of polyp segmentation to evaluate our model. We have conducted extensive experiments using our network to show our model gives better results in terms of segmentation, boundary and shape metrics.
Radiologist is "doctor's doctor", biomedical image segmentation plays a central role in quantitative analysis, clinical diagnosis, and medical intervention. In the light of the fully convolutional networks (FCN) and U-Net, deep convolutional networks (DNNs) have made significant contributions in biomedical image segmentation applications. In this paper, based on U-Net, we propose MDUnet, a multi-scale densely connected U-net for biomedical image segmentation. we propose three different multi-scale dense connections for U shaped architectures encoder, decoder and across them. The highlights of our architecture is directly fuses the neighboring different scale feature maps from both higher layers and lower layers to strengthen feature propagation in current layer. Which can largely improves the information flow encoder, decoder and across them. Multi-scale dense connections, which means containing shorter connections between layers close to the input and output, also makes much deeper U-net possible. We adopt the optimal model based on the experiment and propose a novel Multi-scale Dense U-Net (MDU-Net) architecture with quantization. Which reduce overfitting in MDU-Net for better accuracy. We evaluate our purpose model on the MICCAI 2015 Gland Segmentation dataset (GlaS). The three multi-scale dense connections improve U-net performance by up to 1.8% on test A and 3.5% on test B in the MICCAI Gland dataset. Meanwhile the MDU-net with quantization achieves the superiority over U-Net performance by up to 3% on test A and 4.1% on test B.
Deep neural network architectures have traditionally been designed and explored with human expertise in a long-lasting trial-and-error process. This process requires huge amount of time, expertise, and resources. To address this tedious problem, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally find hyperparameters of a deep network architecture automatically. We specifically focus on designing neural architectures for medical image segmentation task. Our proposed method is based on a policy gradient reinforcement learning for which the reward function is assigned a segmentation evaluation utility (i.e., dice index). We show the efficacy of the proposed method with its low computational cost in comparison with the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation networks. We also present a new architecture design, a densely connected encoder-decoder CNN, as a strong baseline architecture to apply the proposed hyperparameter search algorithm. We apply the proposed algorithm to each layer of the baseline architectures. As an application, we train the proposed system on cine cardiac MR images from Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MICCAI 2017. Starting from a baseline segmentation architecture, the resulting network architecture obtains the state-of-the-art results in accuracy without performing any trial-and-error based architecture design approaches or close supervision of the hyperparameters changes.
Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved great successes in various challenging vision tasks. However, the performance of ConvNets would degrade when encountering the domain shift. The domain adaptation is more significant while challenging in the field of biomedical image analysis, where cross-modality data have largely different distributions. Given that annotating the medical data is especially expensive, the supervised transfer learning approaches are not quite optimal. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework with adversarial learning for cross-modality biomedical image segmentations. Specifically, our model is based on a dilated fully convolutional network for pixel-wise prediction. Moreover, we build a plug-and-play domain adaptation module (DAM) to map the target input to features which are aligned with source domain feature space. A domain critic module (DCM) is set up for discriminating the feature space of both domains. We optimize the DAM and DCM via an adversarial loss without using any target domain label. Our proposed method is validated by adapting a ConvNet trained with MRI images to unpaired CT data for cardiac structures segmentations, and achieved very promising results.
Weak supervision, e.g., in the form of partial labels or image tags, is currently attracting significant attention in CNN segmentation as it can mitigate the lack of full and laborious pixel/voxel annotations. Enforcing high-order (global) inequality constraints on the network output, for instance, on the size of the target region, can leverage unlabeled data, guiding training with domain-specific knowledge. Inequality constraints are very flexible because they do not assume exact prior knowledge. However,constrained Lagrangian dual optimization has been largely avoided in deep networks, mainly for computational tractability reasons.To the best of our knowledge, the method of Pathak et al. is the only prior work that addresses deep CNNs with linear constraints in weakly supervised segmentation. It uses the constraints to synthesize fully-labeled training masks (proposals)from weak labels, mimicking full supervision and facilitating dual optimization.We propose to introduce a differentiable term, which enforces inequality constraints directly in the loss function, avoiding expensive Lagrangian dual iterates and proposal generation. From constrained-optimization perspective, our simple approach is not optimal as there is no guarantee that the constraints are satisfied. However, surprisingly,it yields substantially better results than the proposal-based constrained CNNs, while reducing the computational demand for training.In the context of cardiac images, we reached a segmentation performance close to full supervision using a fraction (0.1%) of the full ground-truth labels and image-level tags.While our experiments focused on basic linear constraints such as the target-region size and image tags, our framework can be easily extended to other non-linear constraints.Therefore, it has the potential to close the gap between weakly and fully supervised learning in semantic image segmentation.
Recent works showed that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be successfully applied in unsupervised domain adaptation, where, given a labeled source dataset and an unlabeled target dataset, the goal is to train powerful classifiers for the target samples. In particular, it was shown that a GAN objective function can be used to learn target features indistinguishable from the source ones. In this work, we extend this framework by (i) forcing the learned feature extractor to be domain-invariant, and (ii) training it through data augmentation in the feature space, namely performing feature augmentation. While data augmentation in the image space is a well established technique in deep learning, feature augmentation has not yet received the same level of attention. We accomplish it by means of a feature generator trained by playing the GAN minimax game against source features. Results show that both enforcing domain-invariance and performing feature augmentation lead to superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art results in several unsupervised domain adaptation benchmarks.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.