Contour-aware network with class-wise convolutions for 3D abdominal multi-organ segmentation

Accurate delineation of multiple organs is a critical process for various medical procedures, which could be operator-dependent and time-consuming. Existing organ segmentation methods, which were mainly inspired by natural image analysis techniques, might not fully exploit the traits of the multi-organ segmentation task and could not accurately segment the organs with various shapes and sizes simultaneously. In this work, the characteristics of multi-organ segmentation are considered: the global count, position and scale of organs are generally predictable, while their local shape and appearance are volatile. Thus, we supplement the region segmentation backbone with a contour localization task to increase the certainty along delicate boundaries. Meantime, each organ has exclusive anatomical traits, which motivates us to deal with class variability with class-wise convolutions to highlight organ-specific features and suppress irrelevant responses at different field-of-views.To validate our method with adequate amounts of patients and organs, we constructed a multi-center dataset, which contains 110 3D CT scans with 24,528 axial slices, and provided voxel-level manual seg-mentations of 14 abdominal organs, which adds up to 1,532 3D structures in total. Extensive ablation and visualization studies on it validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Quantitative analysis shows that we achieve state-of-the-art performance for most abdominal organs, and obtain 3.63 mm 95% Hausdorff Distance and 83.32% Dice Similarity Coefficient on an average.

Automated summary

Accurate delineation of multiple organs is crucial for various medical procedures, but it can be operator-dependent and time-consuming. Existing organ segmentation methods, mainly inspired by natural image analysis techniques, may not fully exploit the characteristics of multi-organ segmentation and accurately segment organs with different shapes and sizes simultaneously. This study considers the traits of multi-organ segmentation and supplements the region segmentation backbone with a contour localization task to increase certainty along delicate boundaries. Furthermore, class-wise convolutions are used to highlight organ-specific features and suppress irrelevant responses, considering each organ's unique anatomical traits.