A New Fully Convolutional Network for 3D Liver Region Segmentation on CT Images
Sun Mingjian1, Xu Jun1*, Ma Wei1, Zhang Yudong2
1(Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China) 2(Department of Radiology, Jiangsu Province Hospital, Nanjing 210029, China)
Abstract:Liver segmentation has important clinical value in liver tumor resection and liver transplantation volume measurement. Because the intensity value of liver and adjacent organs is very close in CT images, the three-dimensional (3D) automated segmentation of the liver region is a challenged task. In order to make the accurate segmentation of liver region, a new deep fully convolutional network (FCN) structure 3DUnet-C2 was proposed. This network made full use of the three-dimensional spatial information of CT image, and combined well the characteristics of shallow and deep layers. In particular, a new network training strategy was proposed. The primary model was obtained by selecting the clear image and intercepting the liver region as a sample. Then the model was leveraged to initialize the network parameters so that the network can converge. Finally, on the basis of the original model, the 3DUnet-C2-CRF model was constructed by using the three-dimensional conditional random field to optimize the liver segmentation boundary. In order to verify the performance of the proposed 3DUnet-C2-CRF on 3D segmentation of liver regions, 100 CT images were chosen from the data set of the ISBI2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge. The Dice coefficient of the segmentation accuracy of the 3DUnet-C2-CRF model on 20 test images reached 96.9%, which is higher than the Dice coefficient of 3DUnet and Vnet models. Experimental results showed that the 3DUnet-C2-CRF model had better feature expression capability and more generalization performance, which improved the segmentation accuracy of the model.
孙明建, 徐军, 马伟, 张玉东. 基于新型深度全卷积网络的肝脏CT影像三维区域自动分割[J]. 中国生物医学工程学报, 2018, 37(4): 385-393.
Sun Mingjian, Xu Jun, Ma Wei, Zhang Yudong. A New Fully Convolutional Network for 3D Liver Region Segmentation on CT Images. Chinese Journal of Biomedical Engineering, 2018, 37(4): 385-393.
[1] Alshaikhli SDS, Yang MY, Rosenhahn B, et al. Automatic 3D liver segmentation using sparse representation of global and local image information via level set formulation[EB/OL]. https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01521, 2015-10-04/2017-09-05.
[2] Heimann T, Meinzer H, Wolf I, et al. A Statistical deformable model for the segmentation of liver ct volumes using extended training data[C]// 3D Segmentation in the Clinic: A Grand Challenge. Canberra: CSIRO, 2007: 161-166.
[3] Kainmüller D, Lange T, Lamecker H. Shape constrained automatic segmentation of the liver based on a heuristic intensity model[C]// 3D Segmentation in the Clinic: A Grand Challenge. Canberra: CSIRO, 2007: 109-116.
[4] Long J, Shelhamer E, Darrell T, et al. Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation[J]. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence, 2014, 39(4):640-651.
[5] Li Guodong, Chen Xinjian, Shi Fei, et al. Automatic liver segmentation based on shape constraints and deformable graph cut in CT images[J]. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2015, 24(12): 5315-5329.
[6] Li Changyang, Wang Xiuying, Eberl S, et al. A likelihood and local constraint level set model for liver tumor segmentation from ct volumes[J]. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2013, 60(10): 2967-2977.
[7] Linguraru MG, Richbourg WJ, Liu J, et al. Tumor burden analysis on computed tomography by automated liver and tumor segmentation[J]. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2012, 31(10): 1965-1976.
[8] Heimann T, Van GB, Styner MA, et al. Comparison and evaluation of methods for liver segmentation from ct datasets[J]. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2009, 28(8):1251-1265.
[9] Christ PF, Elshaer MEA, Ettlinger F, et al. Automatic liver and lesion segmentation in ct using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks and 3d conditional random fields[C]// International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. Cham: Springer, 2016: 415-423.
[10] Dou Qi, Chen Hao, Jin Yueming, et al. 3D deeply supervised network for automatic liver segmentation from ct volumes[C]// International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. Cham: Springer, 2016: 149-157.
[11] Krähenbühl P, Koltun V. Efficient inference in fully connected crfs with gaussian edge potentials[C]//Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. New York: NIPS, 2011: 109-117.
[12] Glorot X, Bordes A, Bengio Y, et al. Deep sparse rectifier neural networks[J]. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2011, 15: 315-323.
[13] Zeiler M D. ADADELTA: an adaptive learning rate method[EB/OL]. https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5701, 2012-12-22/2017-09-05.
[14] Heimann T, Van GB, Styner MA, et al. Comparison and evaluation of methods for liver segmentation from ct datasets[J]. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2009, 28(8):1251-1265.
[15] ÇiçekÖ, Abdulkadir A, Lienkamp SS, et al. 3D U-Net: learning dense volumetric segmentation from sparse annotation[C]// International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. Cham: Springer, 2016: 424-432.
[16] Ioffe S, Szegedy C. Batch normalization: accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift[C]//International Conference on International Conference on Machine Learning. Cham: Springer, 2015:448-456.
[17] Fedorov A, Beichel R, Kalpathy-Cramer J, et al. 3D slicer as an image computing platform for the quantitative imaging network[J]. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 2012, 30(9):1323-1341.
[18] Ronneberger O, Fischer P, Brox T, et al. U-net: convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation[C]// International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. Cham: Springer, 2015:234-241.
[19] Kleesiek J, Urban G, Hubert A, et al. Deep mri brain extraction: a 3d convolutional neural network for skull stripping[J]. NeuroImage, 2016, 129: 460-469.
[20] Milletari F, Ahmadi SA, Kroll C, et al. Hough-cnn: deep learning for segmentation of deep brain regions in MRI and ultrasound[J]. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2017, 164: 92-102.
[21] Milletari F, Navab N, Ahmadi SA, et al. V-net: fully convolutional neural networks for volumetric medical image segmentation[C]// 2016 Fourth International Conference on 3D Vision. California: IEEE, 2016: 565-571.