Prostate Segmentation with Encoder-Decoder Densely Connected Convolutional Network (Ed-Densenet)

• Published in: Proceedings (International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging) pp. 434 - 437
• Main Authors: Yuan, Yixuan, Qin, Wenjian, Guo, Xiaoqing, Buyyounouski, Mark, Hancock, Steve, Han, Bin, Xing, Lei
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.04.2019
• Subjects: Decoding; DenseNet; Encoder-Deconder network; Feature extraction; Image reconstruction; Image segmentation; Magnetic resonance imaging; Prostate cancer; Prostate segmentation; reconstruction error and prediction error; Training
• ISSN: 1945-8452
• DOI: 10.1109/ISBI.2019.8759498

Prostate cancer is a leading cause of mortality among men. Prostate segmentation of Magnetic Resonance (MR) images plays a critical role in treatment planning and image guided interventions. However, manual delineation of prostate is very time-consuming and subjects to large inter-observer variations. To deal with this problem, we proposed a novel Encoder-Decoder Densely Connected Convolutional Network (ED-DenseNet) to segment prostate region automatically. Our model consists of two interconnected pathways, a dense encoder pathway, which learns discriminative high-level image features and a dense decoder pathway, which predicts the final segmentation in the pixel level. Instead of using the convolutional network as the basic unit in the encoder-decoder framework, we utilize Densely Connected Convolutional Network (DenseNet) to preserve the maximum information flow among layers by a densely-connected mechanism. In addition, a novel loss function that jointly considers the encoder-decoder reconstruction error and the prediction error is proposed to optimize the feature learning and segmentation result. Our automatic segmentation result shows high agreement (DSC 87.14%) to the clinical segmentation results by experienced radiation oncologists. In addition, comparison with state-of-the-art methods shows that our ED-DenseNet model is superior in segmentation performance.