Automatic Liver and Tumor Segmentation of CT and MRI Volumes using Cascaded Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

20 Feb 2017 · Patrick Ferdinand Christ, Florian Ettlinger, Felix Grün, Mohamed Ezzeldin A. Elshaera, Jana Lipkova, Sebastian Schlecht, Freba Ahmaddy, Sunil Tatavarty, Marc Bickel, Patrick Bilic, Markus Rempfler, Felix Hofmann, Melvin D Anastasi, Seyed-Ahmad Ahmadi, Georgios Kaissis, Julian Holch, Wieland Sommer, Rickmer Braren, Volker Heinemann, Bjoern Menze ·

Automatic segmentation of the liver and hepatic lesions is an important step towards deriving quantitative biomarkers for accurate clinical diagnosis and computer-aided decision support systems. This paper presents a method to automatically segment liver and lesions in CT and MRI abdomen images using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCNs) enabling the segmentation of a large-scale medical trial or quantitative image analysis. We train and cascade two FCNs for a combined segmentation of the liver and its lesions. In the first step, we train a FCN to segment the liver as ROI input for a second FCN. The second FCN solely segments lesions within the predicted liver ROIs of step 1. CFCN models were trained on an abdominal CT dataset comprising 100 hepatic tumor volumes. Validations on further datasets show that CFCN-based semantic liver and lesion segmentation achieves Dice scores over 94% for liver with computation times below 100s per volume. We further experimentally demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method on an 38 MRI liver tumor volumes and the public 3DIRCAD dataset.

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