CSSegNet: Fine-Grained Cardiac Structures Segmentation Using Dilated Pyramid Pooling in U-net
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in medical imaging for cardiac analysis, offering incremental improvements over existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of blurred boundaries in cardiac structure segmentation by introducing a novel network that embeds dilated pyramid pooling in U-net skip connections, achieving state-of-the-art performance on left and right ventricle cavities segmentation with improvements in Dice coefficient and Hausdorff distance.
Cardiac structure segmentation plays an important role in medical analysis procedures. Images' blurred boundaries issue always limits the segmentation performance. To address this difficult problem, we presented a novel network structure which embedded dilated pyramid pooling block in the skip connections between networks' encoding and decoding stage. A dilated pyramid pooling block is made up of convolutions and pooling operations with different vision scopes. Equipped the model with such module, it could be endowed with multi-scales vision ability. Together combining with other techniques, it included a multi-scales initial features extraction and a multi-resolutions' prediction aggregation module. As for backbone feature extraction network, we referred to the basic idea of Xception network which benefited from separable convolutions. Evaluated on the Post 2017 MICCAI-ACDC challenge phase data, our proposed model could achieve state-of-the-art performance in left ventricle (LVC) cavities and right ventricle cavities (RVC) segmentation tasks. Results revealed that our method has advantages on both geometrical (Dice coefficient, Hausdorff distance) and clinical evaluation (Ejection Fraction, Volume), which represent closer boundaries and more statistically significant separately.