Kid-Net: Convolution Networks for Kidney Vessels Segmentation from CT-Volumes
This addresses the time-consuming and expensive manual annotation of medical images for surgical planning in kidney procedures, representing an incremental improvement in efficiency.
The authors tackled the problem of segmenting kidney vessels from CT volumes, proposing Kid-Net with a training schema that reduces segmentation time from hours to minutes, achieving results in 1-2 minutes for a 512x512x512 volume.
Semantic image segmentation plays an important role in modeling patient-specific anatomy. We propose a convolution neural network, called Kid-Net, along with a training schema to segment kidney vessels: artery, vein and collecting system. Such segmentation is vital during the surgical planning phase in which medical decisions are made before surgical incision. Our main contribution is developing a training schema that handles unbalanced data, reduces false positives and enables high-resolution segmentation with a limited memory budget. These objectives are attained using dynamic weighting, random sampling and 3D patch segmentation. Manual medical image annotation is both time-consuming and expensive. Kid-Net reduces kidney vessels segmentation time from matter of hours to minutes. It is trained end-to-end using 3D patches from volumetric CT-images. A complete segmentation for a 512x512x512 CT-volume is obtained within a few minutes (1-2 mins) by stitching the output 3D patches together. Feature down-sampling and up-sampling are utilized to achieve higher classification and localization accuracies. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation results on a challenging testing dataset show Kid-Net competence.