Abstract
In myocardium segmentation of cardiac magnetic resonance images, ambiguities often appear near the boundaries of the target domains due to tissue similarities. To address this issue, we propose a new architecture, called FOANet, which can be decomposed in three main steps: a localization step, a Gaussian-based contrast enhancement step, and a segmentation step. This architecture is supplied with a hybrid loss function that guides the FOANet to study the transformation relationship between the input image and the corresponding label in a three-level hierarchy (pixel-, patch- and map-level), which is helpful to improve segmentation and recovery of the boundaries. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on two public datasets in terms of regional and boundary segmentations.