Efficient Liver Segmentation from Computed Tomography Images Using Deep Learning

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.

A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Model for Liver Segmentation in Medical Diagnosis

Liver segmentation and recognition from computed tomography (CT) images is a warm topic in image processing which is helpful for doctors and practitioners. Currently, many deep learning methods are used for liver segmentation that takes a long time to train the model which makes this task challenging and limited to larger hardware resources. In this research, we proposed a very lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the liver region from CT scan images. The suggested CNN algorithm consists of 3 convolutional and 2 fully connected layers, where softmax is used to discriminate the liver from background. Random Gaussian distribution is used for weight initialization which achieved a distance-preserving-embedding of the information. The proposed network is known as Ga-CNN (Gaussian-weight initialization of CNN). General experiments are performed on three benchmark datasets including MICCAI SLiver’07, 3Dircadb01, and LiTS17. Experimental results show that the proposed method performed well on each benchmark dataset.

Automatic Deep Feature Learning via Patch-Based Deep Belief Network for Vertebrae Segmentation in CT Images

Precise automatic vertebra segmentation in computed tomography (CT) images is important for the quantitative analysis of vertebrae-related diseases but remains a challenging task due to high variation in spinal anatomy among patients. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach for automatic CT vertebra segmentation named patch-based deep belief networks (PaDBNs). Our proposed PaDBN model automatically selects the features from image patches and then measures the differences between classes and investigates performance. The region of interest (ROI) is obtained from CT images. Unsupervised feature reduction contrastive divergence algorithm is applied for weight initialization, and the weights are optimized by layers in a supervised fine-tuning procedure. The discriminative learning features obtained from the steps above are used as input of a classifier to obtain the likelihood of the vertebrae. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PaDBN model can considerably reduce computational cost and produce an excellent performance in vertebra segmentation in terms of accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods.