Jérôme Lacotte

Left atrial segmentation in a few seconds using fully convolutional network and transfer learning

By Élodie Puybareau, Zhou Zhao, Younes Khoudli, Edwin Carlinet, Yongchao Xu, Jérôme Lacotte, Thierry Géraud

2018-10-25

In Proceedings of the workshop on statistical atlases and computational modelling of the heart (STACOM 2018), in conjunction with MICCAI

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a fast automatic method that segments left atrial cavity from 3D GE-MRIs without any manual assistance, using a fully convolutional network (FCN) and transfer learning. This FCN is the base network of VGG-16, pre-trained on ImageNet for natural image classification, and fine tuned with the training dataset of the MICCAI 2018 Atrial Segmentation Challenge. It relies on the “pseudo-3D” method published at ICIP 2017, which allows for segmenting objects from 2D color images which contain 3D information of MRI volumes. For each $n^{\text{th}}$ slice of the volume to segment, we consider three images, corresponding to the $(n-1)^{\text{th}}$, $n^{\text{th}}$, and $(n+1)^{\text{th}}$ slices of the original volume. These three gray-level 2D images are assembled to form a 2D RGB color image (one image per channel). This image is the input of the FCN to obtain a 2D segmentation of the $n^{\text{th}}$ slice. We process all slices, then stack the results to form the 3D output segmentation. With such a technique, the segmentation of the left atrial cavity on a 3D volume takes only a few seconds. We obtain a Dice score of 0.92 both on the training set in our experiments before the challenge, and on the test set of the challenge.

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