Nie Dong, Wang Li, Trullo Roger, Li Jianfu, Yuan Peng, Xia James, Shen Dinggang
Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA.
Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA.
Mach Learn Med Imaging. 2017;10541:266-273. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-67389-9_31. Epub 2017 Sep 7.
Computed tomography (CT) is commonly used as a diagnostic and treatment planning imaging modality in craniomaxillofacial (CMF) surgery to correct patient's bony defects. A major disadvantage of CT is that it emits harmful ionizing radiation to patients during the exam. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered to be much safer and noninvasive, and often used to study CMF soft tissues (e.g., temporomandibular joint and brain). However, it is extremely difficult to accurately segment CMF bony structures from MRI since both bone and air appear to be black in MRI, along with low signal-to-noise ratio and partial volume effect. To this end, we proposed a 3D deep-learning based cascade framework to solve these issues. Specifically, a 3D fully convolutional network (FCN) architecture is first adopted to coarsely segment the bony structures. As the coarsely segmented bony structures by FCN tend to be thicker, convolutional neural network (CNN) is further utilized for fine-grained segmentation. To enhance the discriminative ability of the CNN, we particularly concatenate the predicted probability maps from FCN and the original MRI, and feed them together into the CNN to provide more context information for segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate a good performance and also the clinical feasibility of our proposed 3D deep-learning based cascade framework.
计算机断层扫描(CT)在颅颌面(CMF)外科手术中通常用作诊断和治疗计划的成像方式,以矫正患者的骨缺损。CT的一个主要缺点是在检查过程中会向患者发射有害的电离辐射。磁共振成像(MRI)被认为要安全得多且是非侵入性的,常用于研究CMF软组织(例如颞下颌关节和大脑)。然而,从MRI中准确分割CMF骨结构极其困难,因为在MRI中骨和空气看起来都是黑色的,同时还存在低信噪比和部分容积效应。为此,我们提出了一种基于3D深度学习的级联框架来解决这些问题。具体而言,首先采用3D全卷积网络(FCN)架构对骨结构进行粗分割。由于FCN粗分割的骨结构往往较厚,因此进一步利用卷积神经网络(CNN)进行细粒度分割。为了增强CNN的判别能力,我们特别将FCN预测的概率图与原始MRI连接起来,并将它们一起输入到CNN中,为分割提供更多的上下文信息。实验结果证明了我们提出的基于3D深度学习的级联框架具有良好的性能以及临床可行性。