Title
Block Level Skip Connections Across Cascaded V-Net for Multi-Organ Segmentation
Abstract
Multi-organ segmentation is a challenging task due to the label imbalance and structural differences between different organs. In this work, we propose an efficient cascaded V-Net model to improve the performance of multi-organ segmentation by establishing dense Block Level Skip Connections (BLSC) across cascaded V-Net. Our model can take full advantage of features from the first stage network and make the cascaded structure more efficient. We also combine stacked small and large kernels with an inception-like structure to help our model to learn more patterns, which produces superior results for multi-organ segmentation. In addition, some small organs are commonly occluded by large organs and have unclear boundaries with other surrounding tissues, which makes them hard to be segmented. We therefore first locate the small organs through a multi-class network and crop them randomly with the surrounding region, then segment them with a single-class network. We evaluated our model on SegTHOR 2019 challenge unseen testing set and Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault challenge validation set. Our model has achieved an average dice score gain of 1.62 percents and 3.90 percents compared to traditional cascaded networks on these two datasets, respectively. For hard-to-segment small organs, such as the esophagus in SegTHOR 2019 challenge, our technique has achieved a gain of 5.63 percents on dice score, and four organs in Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault challenge have achieved a gain of 5.27 percents on average dice score.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TMI.2020.2975347
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Algorithms,Neural Networks, Computer,Tomography, X-Ray Computed
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
0278-0062
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.44
0
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Liang Zhang16410.30
Jiaming Zhang240.44
Peiyi Shen373.57
Guangming Zhu451.48
Ping Li540.44
Xiaoyuan Lu6196.43
Huan Zhang740.44
Syed Afaq Ali Shah89015.23
Mohammed Bennamoun940.44