Robust hepatic vessel segmentation using multi deep convolution network

Abstract

Extraction of blood vessels of the organ is a challenging task in the area of medical image processing. It is really difficult to get accurate vessel segmentation results even with manually labeling by human being. The difficulty of vessels segmentation is the complicated structure of blood vessels and its large variations that make them hard to recognize. In this paper, we present deep artificial neural network architecture to automatically segment the hepatic vessels from computed tomography (CT) image. We proposed novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture for vessel segmentation from a medical CT volume, which consists of three deep convolution neural networks to extract features from difference planes of CT data. The three networks have share features at the first convolution layer but will separately learn their own features in the second layer. All three networks will join again at the top layer. To validate effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method, we conduct experiments on 12 CT volumes which training data are randomly generate from 5 CT volumes and 7 using for test. Our network can yield an average dice coefficient 0.830, while 3D deep convolution neural network can yield around 0.7 and multi-scale can yield only 0.6.