Novel Deep Convolution Neural Network Applied to MRI Cardiac Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a fully automatic MRI cardiac segmentation method based on a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN). As opposed to most cardiac segmentation methods which focus on the left ventricle (and especially the left cavity), our method segments both the left ventricular cavity, the left ventricular epicardium, and the right ventricular cavity. The novelty of our network lies in its maximum a posteriori loss function, which is specifically designed for the cardiac anatomy. Our loss function incorporates the cross-entropy of the predicted labels, the predicted contours, a cardiac shape prior, and an a priori term. Our model also includes a cardiac center-of-mass regression module which allows for an automatic shape prior registration. Also, since our method processes raw MR images without any manual preprocessing and/or image cropping, our CNN learns both high-level features (useful to distinguish the heart from other organs with a similar shape) and low-level features (useful to get accurate segmentation results). Those features are learned with a multi-resolution conv-deconv "grid" architecture which can be seen as an extension of the U-Net. We trained and tested our model on the ACDC MICCAI'17 challenge dataset of 150 patients whose diastolic and systolic images were manually outlined by 2 medical experts. Results reveal that our method can segment all three regions of a 3D MRI cardiac volume in $0.4$ second with an average Dice index of $0.90$, which is significantly better than state-of-the-art deep learning methods.