Automatic abdominal multi-organ segmentation using deep convolutional neural network and time-implicit level sets.

Purpose: Multi-organ segmentation from CT images is an essential step for computer-aided diagnosis and surgery planning. However, manual delineation of the organs by radiologists is tedious, time-consuming and poorly reproducible. Therefore, we propose a fully automatic method for the segmentation of multiple organs from three-dimensional abdominal CT images.

Methods: The proposed method employs deep fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for organ detection and segmentation, which is further refined by a time-implicit multi-phase evolution method. Firstly, a 3D CNN is trained to automatically localize and delineate the organs of interest with a probability prediction map. The learned probability map provides both subject-specific spatial priors and initialization for subsequent fine segmentation. Then, for the refinement of the multi-organ segmentation, image intensity models, probability priors as well as a disjoint region constraint are incorporated into an unified energy functional. Finally, a novel time-implicit multi-phase level-set algorithm is utilized to efficiently optimize the proposed energy functional model.

Results: Our method has been evaluated on 140 abdominal CT scans for the segmentation of four organs (liver, spleen and both kidneys). With respect to the ground truth, average Dice overlap ratios for the liver, spleen and both kidneys are 96.0, 94.2 and 95.4%, respectively, and average symmetric surface distance is less than 1.3 mm for all the segmented organs. The computation time for a CT volume is 125 s in average. The achieved accuracy compares well to state-of-the-art methods with much higher efficiency.

Conclusion: A fully automatic method for multi-organ segmentation from abdominal CT images was developed and evaluated. The results demonstrated its potential in clinical usage with high effectiveness, robustness and efficiency.