Efficient Liver Segmentation from Computed Tomography Images Using Deep Learning.

Journal: Computational intelligence and neuroscience
Published Date:

Abstract

Segmentation of a liver in computed tomography (CT) images is an important step toward quantitative biomarkers for a computer-aided decision support system and precise medical diagnosis. To overcome the difficulties that come across the liver segmentation that are affected by fuzzy boundaries, stacked autoencoder (SAE) is applied to learn the most discriminative features of the liver among other tissues in abdominal images. In this paper, we propose a patch-based deep learning method for the segmentation of a liver from CT images using SAE. Unlike the traditional machine learning methods, instead of anticipating pixel by pixel learning, our algorithm utilizes the patches to learn the representations and identify the liver area. We preprocessed the whole dataset to get the enhanced images and converted each image into many overlapping patches. These patches are given as input to SAE for unsupervised feature learning. Finally, the learned features with labels of the images are fine tuned, and the classification is performed to develop the probability map in a supervised way. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm shows satisfactory results on test images. Our method achieved a 96.47% dice similarity coefficient (DSC), which is better than other methods in the same domain.

Authors

  • Mubashir Ahmad
    Department of Computer Science and IT, The University of Lahore, Sargodha Campus, Sargodha 40100, Pakistan.
  • Syed Furqan Qadri
    College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Computer Vision Institute, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, Guangdong, China.
  • M Usman Ashraf
    Department of Computer Science, GC Women University, Sialkot 51310, Pakistan.
  • Khalid Subhi
    Department of Computer Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia.
  • Salabat Khan
    College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Computer Vision Institute, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province 518060, China.
  • Syeda Shamaila Zareen
    Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China.
  • Salman Qadri
    Computer Science Department, MNS-University of Agriculture, Multan 60650, Pakistan.