The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS)

In this work, we report the set-up and results of the Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LITS) organized in conjunction with the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2016 and International Conference On Medical Image Computing Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2017. Twenty four valid state-of-the-art liver and liver tumor segmentation algorithms were applied to a set of 131 computed tomography (CT) volumes with different types of tumor contrast levels (hyper-/hypo-intense), abnormalities in tissues (metastasectomie) size and varying amount of lesions. The submitted algorithms have been tested on 70 undisclosed volumes. The dataset is created in collaboration with seven hospitals and research institutions and manually reviewed by independent three radiologists. We found that not a single algorithm performed best for liver and tumors. The best liver segmentation algorithm achieved a Dice score of 0.96(MICCAI) whereas for tumor segmentation the best algorithm evaluated at 0.67(ISBI) and 0.70(MICCAI). The LITS image data and manual annotations continue to be publicly available through an online evaluation system as an ongoing benchmarking resource.

Automatic Liver and Tumor Segmentation of CT and MRI Volumes using Cascaded Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

Automatic segmentation of the liver and hepatic lesions is an important step towards deriving quantitative biomarkers for accurate clinical diagnosis and computer-aided decision support systems. This paper presents a method to automatically segment liver and lesions in CT and MRI abdomen images using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCNs) enabling the segmentation of a large-scale medical trial or quantitative image analysis. We train and cascade two FCNs for a combined segmentation of the liver and its lesions. In the first step, we train a FCN to segment the liver as ROI input for a second FCN. The second FCN solely segments lesions within the predicted liver ROIs of step 1. CFCN models were trained on an abdominal CT dataset comprising 100 hepatic tumor volumes. Validations on further datasets show that CFCN-based semantic liver and lesion segmentation achieves Dice scores over 94% for liver with computation times below 100s per volume. We further experimentally demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method on an 38 MRI liver tumor volumes and the public 3DIRCAD dataset.

SurvivalNet: Predicting patient survival from diffusion weighted magnetic resonance images using cascaded fully convolutional and 3D convolutional neural networks

Automatic non-invasive assessment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) malignancy has the potential to substantially enhance tumor treatment strategies for HCC patients. In this work we present a novel framework to automatically characterize the malignancy of HCC lesions from DWI images. We predict HCC malignancy in two steps: As a first step we automatically segment HCC tumor lesions using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCN). A 3D neural network (SurvivalNet) then predicts the HCC lesions' malignancy from the HCC tumor segmentation. We formulate this task as a classification problem with classes being "low risk" and "high risk" represented by longer or shorter survival times than the median survival. We evaluated our method on DWI of 31 HCC patients. Our proposed framework achieves an end-to-end accuracy of 65% with a Dice score for the automatic lesion segmentation of 69% and an accuracy of 68% for tumor malignancy classification based on expert annotations. We compared the SurvivalNet to classical handcrafted features such as Histogram and Haralick and show experimentally that SurvivalNet outperforms the handcrafted features in HCC malignancy classification. End-to-end assessment of tumor malignancy based on our proposed fully automatic framework corresponds to assessment based on expert annotations with high significance (p>0.95).

Automatic Liver and Lesion Segmentation in CT Using Cascaded Fully Convolutional Neural Networks and 3D Conditional Random Fields

Automatic segmentation of the liver and its lesion is an important step towards deriving quantitative biomarkers for accurate clinical diagnosis and computer-aided decision support systems. This paper presents a method to automatically segment liver and lesions in CT abdomen images using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCNs) and dense 3D conditional random fields (CRFs). We train and cascade two FCNs for a combined segmentation of the liver and its lesions. In the first step, we train a FCN to segment the liver as ROI input for a second FCN. The second FCN solely segments lesions from the predicted liver ROIs of step 1. We refine the segmentations of the CFCN using a dense 3D CRF that accounts for both spatial coherence and appearance. CFCN models were trained in a 2-fold cross-validation on the abdominal CT dataset 3DIRCAD comprising 15 hepatic tumor volumes. Our results show that CFCN-based semantic liver and lesion segmentation achieves Dice scores over 94% for liver with computation times below 100s per volume. We experimentally demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method as a decision support system with a high accuracy and speed for usage in daily clinical routine.