Shape complexes: the intersection of label orderings and star convexity constraints in continuous max-flow medical image segmentation

Automatic Liver Segmentation in CT Images with Enhanced GAN and Mask Region-Based CNN Architectures

Liver image segmentation has been increasingly employed for key medical purposes, including liver functional assessment, disease diagnosis, and treatment. In this work, we introduce a liver image segmentation method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) and mask region-based convolutional neural networks (Mask R-CNN). Firstly, since most resulting images have noisy features, we further explored the combination of Mask R-CNN and GANs in order to enhance the pixel-wise classification. Secondly, k-means clustering was used to lock the image aspect ratio, in order to get more essential anchors which can help boost the segmentation performance. Finally, we proposed a GAN Mask R-CNN algorithm which achieved superior performance in comparison with the conventional Mask R-CNN, Mask-CNN, and k-means algorithms in terms of the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and the MICCAI metrics. The proposed algorithm also achieved superior performance in comparison with ten state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of six Boolean indicators. We hope that our work can be effectively used to optimize the segmentation and classification of liver anomalies.

Interactive Outlining of Pancreatic Cancer Liver Metastases in Ultrasound Images

Ultrasound (US) is the most commonly used liver imaging modality worldwide. Due to its low cost, it is increasingly used in the follow-up of cancer patients with metastases localized in the liver. In this contribution, we present the results of an interactive segmentation approach for liver metastases in US acquisitions. A (semi-) automatic segmentation is still very challenging because of the low image quality and the low contrast between the metastasis and the surrounding liver tissue. Thus, the state of the art in clinical practice is still manual measurement and outlining of the metastases in the US images. We tackle the problem by providing an interactive segmentation approach providing real-time feedback of the segmentation results. The approach has been evaluated with typical US acquisitions from the clinical routine, and the datasets consisted of pancreatic cancer metastases. Even for difficult cases, satisfying segmentations results could be achieved because of the interactive real-time behavior of the approach. In total, 40 clinical images have been evaluated with our method by comparing the results against manual ground truth segmentations. This evaluation yielded to an average Dice Score of 85% and an average Hausdorff Distance of 13 pixels.