MRDFF: A deep forest based framework for CT whole heart segmentation

Automatic whole heart segmentation plays an important role in the treatment and research of cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we propose an improved Deep Forest framework, named Multi-Resolution Deep Forest Framework (MRDFF), which accomplishes whole heart segmentation in two stages. We extract the heart region by binary classification in the first stage, thus avoiding the class imbalance problem caused by too much background. The results of the first stage are then subdivided in the second stage to obtain accurate cardiac substructures. In addition, we also propose hybrid feature fusion, multi-resolution fusion and multi-scale fusion to further improve the segmentation accuracy. Experiments on the public dataset MM-WHS show that our model can achieve comparable accuracy in about half the training time of neural network models.

Automated summary

This paper proposes an improved Deep Forest framework (MRDFF) for automatic whole heart segmentation. The framework consists of two stages, where the first stage extracts the heart region through binary classification and the second stage subdivides the results to obtain accurate cardiac substructures. Additionally, methods such as feature fusion, multi-resolution fusion, and multi-scale fusion are proposed to further improve segmentation accuracy.