Fully automated organ segmentation in male pelvic CT images

Phys Med Biol. 2018 Dec 14;63(24):245015. doi: 10.1088/1361-6560/aaf11c.

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of prostate and surrounding organs at risk is important for prostate cancer radiotherapy treatment planning. We present a fully automated workflow for male pelvic CT image segmentation using deep learning. The architecture consists of a 2D organ volume localization network followed by a 3D segmentation network for volumetric segmentation of prostate, bladder, rectum, and femoral heads. We used a multi-channel 2D U-Net followed by a 3D U-Net with encoding arm modified with aggregated residual networks, known as ResNeXt. The models were trained and tested on a pelvic CT image dataset comprising 136 patients. Test results show that 3D U-Net based segmentation achieves mean (±SD) Dice coefficient values of 90 (±2.0)%, 96 (±3.0)%, 95 (±1.3)%, 95 (±1.5)%, and 84 (±3.7)% for prostate, left femoral head, right femoral head, bladder, and rectum, respectively, using the proposed fully automated segmentation method.

MeSH terms

  • Automation
  • Deep Learning
  • Femur Head / diagnostic imaging
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Male
  • Pelvis / diagnostic imaging*
  • Prostate / diagnostic imaging*
  • Radiotherapy Planning, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Rectum / diagnostic imaging*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Risk
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed*
  • Urinary Bladder / diagnostic imaging*