A Survey on Shape-Constraint Deep Learning for Medical Image Segmentation.

Since the advent of U-Net, fully convolutional deep neural networks and its many variants have completely changed the modern landscape of deep-learning based medical image segmentation. However, the over-dependence of these methods on pixel-level classification and regression has been identified early on as a problem. Especially when trained on medical databases with sparse available annotation, these methods are prone to generate segmentation artifacts such as fragmented structures, topological inconsistencies and islands of pixel.

Retrospective in silico evaluation of optimized preoperative planning for temporal bone surgery.

Purpose: Robot-assisted surgery at the temporal bone utilizing a flexible drilling unit would allow safer access to clinical targets such as the cochlea or the internal auditory canal by navigating along nonlinear trajectories. One key sub-step for clinical realization of such a procedure is automated preoperative surgical planning that incorporates both segmentation of risk structures and optimized trajectory planning.

Methods: We automatically segment risk structures using 3D U-Nets with probabilistic active shape models.