Feature-Fused Context-Encoding Network for Neuroanatomy Segmentation
This work addresses the problem of accurate and efficient neuroanatomy segmentation for medical imaging applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing deep learning methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of efficiently segmenting fine-grained brain structures from MR images by proposing a Feature-Fused Context-Encoding Network that integrates 2D, spatial, and global context encoding modules, achieving improved performance over state-of-the-art methods on datasets with up to 134 fine-grained and 27 coarse structures.
Automatic segmentation of fine-grained brain structures remains a challenging task. Current segmentation methods mainly utilize 2D and 3D deep neural networks. The 2D networks take image slices as input to produce coarse segmentation in less processing time, whereas the 3D networks take the whole image volumes to generated fine-detailed segmentation with more computational burden. In order to obtain accurate fine-grained segmentation efficiently, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end Feature-Fused Context-Encoding Network for brain structure segmentation from MR (magnetic resonance) images. Our model is implemented based on a 2D convolutional backbone, which integrates a 2D encoding module to acquire planar image features and a spatial encoding module to extract spatial context information. A global context encoding module is further introduced to capture global context semantics from the fused 2D encoding and spatial features. The proposed network aims to fully leverage the global anatomical prior knowledge learned from context semantics, which is represented by a structure-aware attention factor to recalibrate the outputs of the network. In this way, the network is guaranteed to be aware of the class-dependent feature maps to facilitate the segmentation. We evaluate our model on 2012 Brain Multi-Atlas Labelling Challenge dataset for 134 fine-grained structure segmentation. Besides, we validate our network on 27 coarse structure segmentation tasks. Experimental results have demonstrated that our model can achieve improved performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.