Deep Q Learning Driven CT Pancreas Segmentation With Geometry-Aware U-Net

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2019 Aug;38(8):1971-1980. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2019.2911588. Epub 2019 Apr 16.

Abstract

The segmentation of pancreas is important for medical image analysis, yet it faces great challenges of class imbalance, background distractions, and non-rigid geometrical features. To address these difficulties, we introduce a deep Q network (DQN) driven approach with deformable U-Net to accurately segment the pancreas by explicitly interacting with contextual information and extract anisotropic features from pancreas. The DQN-based model learns a context-adaptive localization policy to produce a visually tightened and precise localization bounding box of the pancreas. Furthermore, deformable U-Net captures geometry-aware information of pancreas by learning geometrically deformable filters for feature extraction. The experiments on NIH dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in pancreas segmentation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Databases, Factual
  • Deep Learning*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Pancreas / diagnostic imaging*
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods*