Automatic Liver Segmentation Using an Adversarial Image-to-Image Network
This work addresses liver segmentation for clinical applications like diagnosis and surgical planning, but it is incremental as it builds on existing adversarial and encoder-decoder networks.
The authors tackled the problem of automatic liver segmentation in 3D CT volumes, which is challenging due to complex backgrounds and fuzzy boundaries, and their method outperformed state-of-the-art solutions in accuracy and efficiency.
Automatic liver segmentation in 3D medical images is essential in many clinical applications, such as pathological diagnosis of hepatic diseases, surgical planning, and postoperative assessment. However, it is still a very challenging task due to the complex background, fuzzy boundary, and various appearance of liver. In this paper, we propose an automatic and efficient algorithm to segment liver from 3D CT volumes. A deep image-to-image network (DI2IN) is first deployed to generate the liver segmentation, employing a convolutional encoder-decoder architecture combined with multi-level feature concatenation and deep supervision. Then an adversarial network is utilized during training process to discriminate the output of DI2IN from ground truth, which further boosts the performance of DI2IN. The proposed method is trained on an annotated dataset of 1000 CT volumes with various different scanning protocols (e.g., contrast and non-contrast, various resolution and position) and large variations in populations (e.g., ages and pathology). Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of segmentation accuracy and computing efficiency.