Performance improvement of weakly supervised fully convolutional networks by skip connections for brain structure segmentation.

Journal: Medical physics
Published Date:

Abstract

PURPOSE: For the planning and navigation of neurosurgery, we have developed a fully convolutional network (FCN)-based method for brain structure segmentation on magnetic resonance (MR) images. The capability of an FCN depends on the quality of the training data (i.e., raw data and annotation data) and network architectures. The improvement of annotation quality is a significant concern because it requires much labor for labeling organ regions. To address this problem, we focus on skip connection architectures and reveal which skip connections are effective for training FCNs using sparsely annotated brain images.

Authors

  • Takaaki Sugino
    Department of Biomedical Information, Institute of Biomaterials and Bioengineering, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Tokyo, Japan.
  • Holger R Roth
  • Masahiro Oda
    Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan.
  • Taichi Kin
    Department of Neurosurgery, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
  • Nobuhito Saito
  • Yoshikazu Nakajima
    Kansai Molecular Diagnosis Network for CNS Tumors, Osaka, 540-0006, Japan.
  • Kensaku Mori
    Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan.