PurposeDeep learning is the standard for medical image segmentation. However, it may encounter difficulties when the training set is small. Also, it may generate anatomically aberrant segmentations. Anatomical knowledge can be potentially useful as a constraint in deep learning segmentation methods. We propose a loss function based on projected pooling to introduce soft topological constraints. Our main application is the segmentation of the red nucleus from quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) which is of interest in parkinsonian syndromes.ApproachThis new loss function introduces soft constraints on the topology by magnifying small parts of the structure to segment to avoid that they are discarded in the segmentation process. To that purpose, we use projection of the structure onto the three planes and then use a series of MaxPooling operations with increasing kernel sizes. These operations are performed both for the ground truth and the prediction and the difference is computed to obtain the loss function. As a result, it can reduce topological errors as well as defects in the structure boundary. The approach is easy to implement and computationally efficient.ResultsWhen applied to the segmentation of the red nucleus from QSM data, the approach led to a very high accuracy (Dice 89.9%) and no topological errors. Moreover, the proposed loss function improved the Dice accuracy over the baseline when the training set was small. We also studied three tasks from the medical segmentation decathlon challenge (MSD) (heart, spleen, and hippocampus). For the MSD tasks, the Dice accuracies were similar for both approaches but the topological errors were reduced.ConclusionsWe propose an effective method to automatically segment the red nucleus which is based on a new loss for introducing topology constraints in deep learning segmentation.
KEYWORDS: Image segmentation, Education and training, Feature fusion, Deep learning, Medical imaging, Heart, Spleen, Data modeling, Parkinson disease, Fourier transforms
Deep models have been shown to tend to fit the target function from low to high frequencies (a phenomenon called the frequency principle of deep learning). One may hypothesize that such property can be leveraged for better training of deep learning models, in particular for segmentation tasks where annotated datasets are often small. In this paper, we exploit this property to propose a new training method based on frequency-domain disentanglement. It consists of three main stages. First, it disentangles the image into high- and low-frequency components. Then, the segmentation network model learns them separately (the approach is general and can use any segmentation network as backbone). Finally, feature fusion is performed to complete the downstream task. The method was applied to the segmentation of the red and dentate nuclei in Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) data and to three tasks of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) challenge under different training sample sizes. For segmenting the red and dentate nuclei and the heart, the proposed approach resulted in considerable improvements over the baseline (respectively between 8 and 16 points of Dice and between 5 and 8 points). On the other hand, there was no improvement for the spleen and the hippocampus. We believe that these intriguing results, which echo theoretical work on the frequency principle of deep learning, are of interest for discussion at the conference. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/GuanghuiFU/frequency_disentangled_learning.
When performing manual segmentations, experts heavily rely on prior anatomical knowledge. Topology is an important prior information due to its stability across patients. Recently, several losses based on persistent homology were proposed to constrain topology. However, such approaches are computationally expensive and complex to implement, in particular in 3D. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function to introduce topological priors in deep learning-based segmentation, which is fast to compute and easy to implement. Our approach was evaluated in several medical datasets (spleen, heart, hippocampus, red nucleus). It allowed reducing topological errors and, in some cases, improving voxel-level accuracy.
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