A Novel U-Net Based Deep Learning Method for 3D Cardiovascular MRI Segmentation.

Journal: Computational intelligence and neuroscience
Published Date:

Abstract

Medical multiobjective image segmentation aims to group pixels to form multiple regions based on the different properties of the medical images. Segmenting the 3D cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) images is still a challenging task owing to several reasons, including individual differences in heart shapes, varying signal intensities, and differences in data signal-to-noise ratios. This paper proposes a novel and efficient U-Net-based 3D sparse convolutional network named SparseVoxNet. In this network, there are direct connections between any two layers with the same feature-map size, and the number of connections is reduced. Therefore, the SparseVoxNet can effectively cope with the optimization problem of gradients vanishing when training a 3D deep neural network model on small sample data by significantly decreasing the network depth, and achieveing better feature representation using a spatial self-attention mechanism finally. The proposed method in this paper has been thoroughly evaluated on the HVSMR 2016 dataset. Compared with other methods, the method achieves better performance.

Authors

  • Yinan Lu
    College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130000, China.
  • Yan Zhao
    Emergency Center, Hubei Clinical Research Center for Emergency and Resuscitaion, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
  • Xing Chen
    School of Information and Electrical Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, 221116, China. xingchen@amss.ac.cn.
  • Xiaoxin Guo
    College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130000, China.