Extracting organs of interest from medical images based on convolutional neural network with auxiliary and refined constraints

Accurately extracting organs from medical images provides radiologist with more comprehensive evidences to clinical diagnose, which offers up a higher accuracy and efficiency. However, the key to achieving accurate segmentation lies in abundant clues for contour distinction, which has a high demand for the network architecture design and its practical training status. To this end, we design auxiliary and refined constraints to optimize the energy function by supplying additional guidance in training procedure, thus promoting model's ability to capture information. Specifically, for the auxiliary constraint, a set of convolutional structures are involved into a conventional network to act as a discriminator, then adversarial network is established. Based on the obtained architecture, we further build adversarial mechanism by introducing a second discriminator into segmentor for refinement. The involvement of refined constraint contributes to ameliorate training situation, optimize model performance, and boost its ability of collecting information for segmentation. We evaluate the proposed framework on two public databases (NIH Pancreas-CT and MICCAI Sliver07). Experimental results show that the proposed network achieves comparable performance to current pancreas segmentation algorithms and outperforms most state-of-the-art liver segmentation methods. The obtained results on public datasets sufficiently demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for organ segmentation.