Dynamic pixel-wise weighting-based fully convolutional neural networks for left ventricle segmentation in short-axis MRI

Abstract

Left ventricle (LV) segmentation in cardiac MRI is an essential procedure for quantitative diagnosis of various cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we present a novel fully automatic left ventricle segmentation approach based on convolutional neural networks. The proposed network fully takes advantages of the hierarchical architecture and integrate the multi-scale feature together for segmenting the myocardial region of LV. Moreover, we put forward a dynamic pixel-wise weighting strategy, which can dynamically adjust the weight of each pixel according to the segmentation accuracy of upper layer and force the pixel classifier to take more attention on the misclassified ones. By this way, the LV segmentation performance of our method can be improved a lot especially for the apical and basal slices in cine MR images. The experiments on the CAP database demonstrate that our method achieves a substantial improvement compared with other well-know deep learning methods. Beside these, we discussed two major limitations in convolutional neural networks-based semantic segmentation methods for LV segmentation.