GAN-based Automatic Segmentation of Thoracic Aorta from Non-contrast-Enhanced CT Images

Sammanfattning: The deep learning-based automatic segmentation methods have developed rapidly in recent years to give a promising performance in the medical image segmentation tasks, which provide clinical medicine with an accurate and fast computer-aided diagnosis method. Generative adversarial networks and their extended frameworks have achieved encouraging results on image-to-image translation problems. In this report, the proposed hybrid network combined cycle-consistent adversarial networks, which transformed contrast-enhanced images from computed tomography angiography to the conventional low-contrast CT scans, with the segmentation network and trained them simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. The trained segmentation network was tested on the non-contrast-enhanced CT images. The synthetic process and the segmentation process were also implemented in a two-stage manner. The two-stage process achieved a higher Dice similarity coefficient than the baseline U-Net did on test data, but the proposed hybrid network did not outperform the baseline due to the field of view difference between the two training data sets.