Title
Slice imputation: Multiple intermediate slices interpolation for anisotropic 3D medical image segmentation
Abstract
We introduce a novel frame-interpolation-based method for slice imputation to improve segmentation accuracy for anisotropic 3D medical images, in which the number of slices and their corresponding segmentation labels can be increased between two consecutive slices in anisotropic 3D medical volumes. Unlike previous inter-slice imputation methods, which only focus on the smoothness in the axial direction, this study aims to improve the smoothness of the interpolated 3D medical volumes in all three directions: axial, sagittal, and coronal. The proposed multitask inter-slice imputation method, in particular, incorporates a smoothness loss function to evaluate the smoothness of the interpolated 3D medical volumes in the through-plane direction (sagittal and coronal). It not only improves the resolution of the interpolated 3D medical volumes in the through-plane direction but also transforms them into isotropic representations, which leads to better segmentation performances. Experiments on whole tumor segmentation in the brain, liver tumor segmentation, and prostate segmentation indicate that our method outperforms the competing slice imputation methods on both computed tomography (1\% Dice improvement for CT liver tumor segmentation) and magnetic resonance images volumes (over 2\% Dice improvement for MRI prostate segmentation) in most cases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.105667
Computers in Biology and Medicine
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Slice imputation,Frame interpolation,Medical image segmentation,Multi-task learning,Deep learning
Journal
147
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0010-4825
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhaotao Wu100.34
Jia Wei298.86
Jiabing Wang352.43
Rui Li4459.51