Hybrid Cascaded Neural Network for Liver Lesion Segmentation
This work addresses the problem of accurate liver lesion segmentation for medical professionals, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles liver lesion segmentation by proposing a hybrid cascaded system combining 2D and 3D CNNs to segment both large tumors and small lesions, achieving a Dice score of 68.1% on the LiTS challenge, which is the best among non pre-trained models and second best overall.
Automatic liver lesion segmentation is a challenging task while having a significant impact on assisting medical professionals in the designing of effective treatment and planning proper care. In this paper we propose a cascaded system that combines both 2D and 3D convolutional neural networks to effectively segment hepatic lesions. Our 2D network operates on a slice by slice basis to segment the liver and larger tumors, while we use a 3D network to detect small lesions that are often missed in a 2D segmentation design. We employ this algorithm on the LiTS challenge obtaining a Dice score per case of 68.1%, which performs the best among all non pre-trained models and the second best among published methods. We also perform two-fold cross-validation to reveal the over- and under-segmentation issues in the LiTS annotations.