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Medical image segmentation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis and widely developed for many clinical applications. While deep learning-based approaches have achieved impressive performance in semantic segmentation, they are limited to pixel-wise settings with imbalanced-class data problems and weak boundary object segmentation in medical images. In this paper, we tackle those limitations by developing a new two-branch deep network architecture which takes both higher level features and lower level features into account. The first branch extracts higher level feature as region information by a common encoder-decoder network structure such as Unet and FCN, whereas the second branch focuses on lower level features as support information around the boundary and processes in parallel to the first branch. Our key contribution is the second branch named Narrow Band Active Contour (NB-AC) attention model which treats the object contour as a hyperplane and all data inside a narrow band as support information that influences the position and orientation of the hyperplane. Our proposed NB-AC attention model incorporates the contour length with the region energy involving a fixed-width band around the curve or surface. The proposed network loss contains two fitting terms: (i) a high level feature (i.e., region) fitting term from the first branch; (ii) a lower level feature (i.e., contour) fitting term from the second branch including the (ii1) length of the object contour and (ii2) regional energy functional formed by the homogeneity criterion of both the inner band and outer band neighboring the evolving curve or surface. The proposed NB-AC loss can be incorporated into both 2D and 3D deep network architectures. The proposed network has been evaluated on different challenging medical image datasets, including DRIVE, iSeg17, MRBrainS18 and Brats18. The experimental results have shown that the proposed NB-AC loss outperforms other mainstream loss functions: Cross Entropy, Dice, Focal on two common segmentation frameworks Unet and FCN. Our 3D network which is built upon the proposed NB-AC loss and 3DUnet framework achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple volumetric datasets.
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Offset Curves Loss for Imbalanced Problem in Medical Segmentation
Medical image segmentation has played an important role in medical analysis and widely developed for many clinical applications. Deep learning-based approaches have achieved high performance in semantic segmentation but they are limited to pixel-wise setting and imbalanced classes data problem. In this paper, we tackle those limitations by developing a new deep learning-based model which takes into account both higher feature level i.e. region inside contour, intermediate feature level i.e. offset curves around the contour and lower feature level i.e. contour. Our proposed Offset Curves (OsC) loss consists of three main fitting terms. The first fitting term focuses on pixel-wise level segmentation whereas the second fitting term acts as attention model which pays attention to the area around the boundaries (offset curves). The third terms plays a role as regularization term which takes the length of boundaries into account. We evaluate our proposed OsC loss on both 2D network and 3D network. Two common medical datasets, i.e. retina DRIVE and brain tumor BRATS 2018 datasets are used to benchmark our proposed loss performance. The experiments have shown that our proposed OsC loss function outperforms other mainstream loss functions such as Cross-Entropy, Dice, Focal on the most common segmentation networks Unet, FCN.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1946391
- PAR ID:
- 10321628
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/icpr48806.2021.9411921
