3D Fully Convolutional Networks for Intervertebral Disc Localization and Segmentation

  • Hao Chen
  • Qi Dou
  • Xi Wang
  • Jing Qin
  • Jack C. Y. Cheng
  • Pheng-Ann Heng
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9805)

Abstract

Accurate localization and segmentation of intervertebral discs (IVDs) from volumetric data is a pre-requisite for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. With the advance of deep learning, 2D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on 2D image segmentation related tasks. However, how to segment objects such as IVDs from volumetric data hasn’t been well addressed so far. In order to resolve above problem, we extend the 2D FCN into a 3D variant with end-to-end learning and inference, where voxel-wise predictions are generated. In order to compare the performance of 2D and 3D deep learning methods on volumetric segmentation, two different frameworks are studied: one is a 2D FCN with deep feature representations by making use of adjacent slices, the other one is a 3D FCN with flexible 3D convolutional kernels. We evaluated our methods on the 3D MRI data of MICCAI 2015 Challenge on Automatic Intervertebral Disc Localization and Segmentation. Extensive experimental results corroborated that 3D FCN can achieve a higher localization and segmentation accuracy than 2D FCN, which demonstrates the significance of volumetric information when confronting 3D localization and segmentation tasks.

Keywords

Segmentation Result Convolutional Neural Network Feature Volume Volumetric Data Segmentation Task 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Notes

Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was supported by Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Nos. CUHK 412513 and CUHK 14202514).

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Hao Chen
    • 1
  • Qi Dou
    • 1
  • Xi Wang
    • 2
  • Jing Qin
    • 3
  • Jack C. Y. Cheng
    • 4
  • Pheng-Ann Heng
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Computer Science and EngineeringThe Chinese University of Hong KongHong KongChina
  2. 2.College of Computer ScienceSichuan UniversityChengduChina
  3. 3.School of NursingThe Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityHong KongChina
  4. 4.Prince of Wales HospitalThe Chinese University of Hong KongHong KongChina

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