Multi-organ Segmentation Network with Adversarial Performance Validator
This addresses the challenge of accurate and efficient organ segmentation for medical image analysis, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing 2D and 3D CNN methods.
The paper tackles the problem of multi-organ segmentation in CT images by introducing an adversarial performance validation network into a 2D-to-3D framework, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on small organ segmentation and high accuracy on a custom multi-organ dataset.
CT organ segmentation on computed tomography (CT) images becomes a significant brick for modern medical image analysis, supporting clinic workflows in multiple domains. Previous segmentation methods include 2D convolution neural networks (CNN) based approaches, fed by CT image slices that lack the structural knowledge in axial view, and 3D CNN-based methods with the expensive computation cost in multi-organ segmentation applications. This paper introduces an adversarial performance validation network into a 2D-to-3D segmentation framework. The classifier and performance validator competition contribute to accurate segmentation results via back-propagation. The proposed network organically converts the 2D-coarse result to 3D high-quality segmentation masks in a coarse-to-fine manner, allowing joint optimization to improve segmentation accuracy. Besides, the structural information of one specific organ is depicted by a statistics-meaningful prior bounding box, which is transformed into a global feature leveraging the learning process in 3D fine segmentation. The experiments on the NIH pancreas segmentation dataset demonstrate the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on small organ segmentation and outperforms the previous best. High accuracy is also reported on multi-organ segmentation in a dataset collected by ourselves.