Partial Label Multi-organ Segmentation based on Local Feature Enhancement.

Abstract

The automatic segmentation of abdominal organs from CT images is essential for surgical planning of abdominal diseases. However, each medical institution only annotates some organs according to its own clinical practice. This brings the partial annotation problem to multi-center abdominal multi-organ segmentation. To address this issue, we introduce a 3D local feature enhanced multi-head segmentation network for multi-organ segmentation of abdominal regions in multiple partially labeled datasets. More specifically, our proposed architecture consists of two branches, the global branch with 3D Transformer and U-Net fusion named 3D TransUNet as the backbone, and the local 3D U-Net branch that provides additional abdominal organ structure information to the global branch to generate more accurate segmentation results. We evaluate our method on four publicly available CT datasets with four different partial label. Our experiments show that the proposed approach provides better accuracy and robustness, with 93.01% average Dice-score-coefficient (DSC) and 3.489 mm Hausdorff Distance (HD) outperforming three existing state-of-the-art methods.