Weakly Supervised Whole Cardiac Segmentation via Attentional CNN

Part 2: Machine Learning International audience Whole-heart segmentation aims to delineate substructures of the heart, which plays an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, segmenting each substructure quickly and accurately is arduous due to traditional manual segmentation being extremely slow, the cost is high and the segmentation accuracy depends on experts’ level. Inspired by deep learning, we propose a weakly supervised CNN method to effectively segment the substructure from CT cardiac images. First, we utilize the deformable image registration technology to generate pseudo masks with high confidence for whole heart datasets, which can provide rich feature information to distinguish foreground and background. Meanwhile, the ground truth is used to cut patches containing more heart substructures so that the network can obtain more information about heart substructures. Then, we developed a novel loss function based on the weighted cross-entropy to enforce CNN to pay more attention to the tricky voxels nearby the boundary of cardiac substructures during the training stage. The proposed method was evaluated on MICCAI2017 whole heart CT datasets, and the overall segmentation score of 91.30%.