Dense volumetric detection and segmentation of mediastinal lymph nodes in chest CT images

Oda H, Roth HR, Bhatia KK, Oda M, Kitasaka T, Iwano S, Homma H, Takabatake H, Mori M, Natori H, Schnabel JA, Mori K (2018)


Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2018

Journal

Publisher: SPIE

Book Volume: 10575

Conference Proceedings Title: Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE

Event location: Houston, TX, USA

ISBN: 9781510616394

DOI: 10.1117/12.2287066

Abstract

We propose a novel mediastinal lymph node detection and segmentation method from chest CT volumes based on fully convolutional networks (FCNs). Most lymph node detection methods are based on filters for blob-like structures, which are not specific for lymph nodes. The 3D U-Net is a recent example of the state-of-the-art 3D FCNs. The 3D U-Net can be trained to learn appearances of lymph nodes in order to output lymph node likelihood maps on input CT volumes. However, it is prone to oversegmentation of each lymph node due to the strong data imbalance between lymph nodes and the remaining part of the CT volumes. To moderate the balance of sizes between the target classes, we train the 3D U-Net using not only lymph node annotations but also other anatomical structures (lungs, airways, aortic arches, and pulmonary arteries) that can be extracted robustly in an automated fashion. We applied the proposed method to 45 cases of contrast-enhanced chest CT volumes. Experimental results showed that 95.5% of lymph nodes were detected with 16.3 false positives per CT volume. The segmentation results showed that the proposed method can prevent oversegmentation, achieving an average Dice score of 52.3 ± 23.1%, compared to the baseline method with 49.2 ± 23.8%, respectively.

Involved external institutions

How to cite

APA:

Oda, H., Roth, H.R., Bhatia, K.K., Oda, M., Kitasaka, T., Iwano, S.,... Mori, K. (2018). Dense volumetric detection and segmentation of mediastinal lymph nodes in chest CT images. In Kensaku Mori, Nicholas Petrick (Eds.), Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE. Houston, TX, USA: SPIE.

MLA:

Oda, Hirohisa, et al. "Dense volumetric detection and segmentation of mediastinal lymph nodes in chest CT images." Proceedings of the Medical Imaging 2018: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, Houston, TX, USA Ed. Kensaku Mori, Nicholas Petrick, SPIE, 2018.

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