3D Dense Volumetric Network for Accurate Automated Pancreas Segmentation.

Pancreatic cancer poses a great threat to our health with an overall five-year survival rate of 8%. Automatic and accurate segmentation of pancreas plays an important and prerequisite role in computer-assisted diagnosis and treatment. Due to the ambiguous pancreas borders and intertwined surrounding tissues, it is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D Dense Volumetric Network (3DVNet) to improve the segmentation accuracy of pancreas organ. Firstly, 3D fully convolutional architecture is applied to effectively incorporate the 3D pancreas and geometric cues for volume-to-volume segmentation. Then, dense connectivity is introduced to preserve the maximum information flow between layers and reduce the overfitting on limited training data. In addition, a auxiliary side path is constructed to help the gradient propagation to stabilize the training process. Adequate experiments are conducted on a challenging pancreas dataset in Medical Segmentation Decathlon challenge. The results demonstrate our method can outperform other comparison methods on the task of automated pancreas segmentation using limited data.Clinical relevance-This paper proposes an accurate automated pancreas segmentation method, which can provide assistance to clinicians in the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer.