Ensemble of Multi-sized FCNs to Improve White Matter Lesion Segmentation

摘要

In this paper, we develop a two-stage neural network solution for the challenging task of white-matter lesion segmentation. To cope with the vast variability in lesion sizes, we sample brain MR scans with patches at three different dimensions and feed them into separate fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs). In the second stage, we process large and small lesion separately, and use ensemble-nets to combine the segmentation results generated from the FCNs. A novel activation function is adopted in the ensemble-nets to improve the segmentation accuracy measured by Dice Similarity Coefficient. Experiments on MICCAI 2017 White Matter Hyperintensities (WMH) Segmentation Challenge data demonstrate that our two-stage-multi-sized FCN approach, as well as the new activation function, are effective in capturing white-matter lesions in MR images.