Title
Unsupervised Segmentation of 3D Medical Images Based on Clustering and Deep Representation Learning
Abstract
This paper presents a novel unsupervised segmentation method for 3D medical images. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have brought significant advances in image segmentation. However, most of the recent methods rely on supervised learning, which requires large amounts of manually annotated data. Thus, it is challenging for these methods to cope with the growing amount of medical images. This paper proposes a unified approach to unsupervised deep representation learning and clustering for segmentation. Our proposed method consists of two phases. In the first phase, we learn deep feature representations of training patches from a target image using joint unsupervised learning (JULE) that alternately clusters representations generated by a CNN and updates the CNN parameters using cluster labels as supervisory signals. We extend JULE to 3D medical images by utilizing 3D convolutions throughout the CNN architecture. In the second phase, we apply k-means to the deep representations from the trained CNN and then project cluster labels to the target image in order to obtain the fully segmented image. We evaluated our methods on three images of lung cancer specimens scanned with micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). The automatic segmentation of pathological regions in micro-CT could further contribute to the pathological examination process. Hence, we aim to automatically divide each image into the regions of invasive carcinoma, noninvasive carcinoma, and normal tissue. Our experiments show the potential abilities of unsupervised deep representation learning for medical image segmentation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1117/12.2293414
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Segmentation,Micro-CT,Representation Learning,Unsupervised Learning,Deep Learning
Pattern recognition,Computer science,Segmentation,Convolutional neural network,Convolution,Supervised learning,Image segmentation,Unsupervised learning,Artificial intelligence,Cluster analysis,Feature learning
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
10578
0277-786X
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
3
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Takayasu Moriya132.42
Holger Roth273745.70
Shota Nakamura332.42
Hirohisa Oda4458.30
Kai Nagara531.74
Masahiro Oda618240.81
Kensaku Mori71125160.28