Automated Segmentation Method for Low Field 3D Stomach MRI Using Transferred Learning Image Enhancement Network

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of abdominal organs has always been a difficult problem, especially for organs with cavities. And MRI-guided radiotherapy is particularly attractive for abdominal targets compared with low CT contrast. But in the limit of radiotherapy environment, only low field MRI segmentation can be used for stomach location, tracking, and treatment planning. In clinical applications, the existing 3D segmentation network model is trained by the low field MRI, and the segmentation result cannot be used in radiotherapy plan since the bad segmentation performance. Another way is that historical high field intensity MR images are directly used for data expansion to network learning; there will be a domain shift problem. How to use different domain images to improve the segmentation accuracy of deep neural network? A 3D low field MRI stomach segmentation method based on transfer learning image enhancement is proposed in this paper. In this method, Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) is used to construct and learn the mapping relationship between high and low field intensity MRI and to overcome domain shift. Then, the image generated by the high field intensity MRI through the CycleGAN network is with transferred information as the extended data. The low field MRI combines these extended datasets to form the training data for training the 3D Res-Unet segmentation network. Furthermore, the convolution layer, batch normalization layer, and Relu layer together were replaced with a residual module to relieve the gradient disappearance of the neural network. The experimental results show that the Dice coefficient is 2.5 percent better than the baseline method. The over segmentation and under segmentation are reduced by 0.7 and 5.5 percent, respectively. And the sensitivity is improved by 6.4 percent.