Sparsely Connected Convolutional Layers in CNNs for Liver Segmentation in CT

Zusammenfassung

Convolutional neural networks are currently the best working solution for automatic liver segmentation. Generally, each convolutional layer processes all feature maps from the previous layer. We show that the introduction of sparsely connected convolutional layers into the U-Net architecture can benefit the quality of liver segmentation and results in the increase of the dice coeffcient by 0:32% and a reduction of the mean surface distance by 3:84 mm on the LiTS data. Evaluation on the IRCAD data set with the application of post-processing showed a 0:70% higher Dice coeffcient and a 0:26 mm lower mean surface distance.