A Multi-Scale Network with the Encoder-Decoder Structure for CMR Segmentation

Abstract

Cardiomyopathy is one of the most serious public health threats. The precise structural and functional cardiac measurement is an essential step for clinical diagnosis and follow-up treatment planning. Cardiologists are often required to draw endocardial and epicardial contours of the left ventricle (LV) manually in routine clinical diagnosis or treatment planning period. This task is time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a fully automated end-to-end semantic segmentation method on cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging datasets. However, due to the low image quality and the deformation caused by heartbeat, there is no effective tool for fully automated end-to-end cardiac segmentation task. In this work, we propose a multi-scale segmentation network (MSSN) for left ventricle segmentation. It can effectively learn myocardium and blood pool structure representations from 2D short-axis CMR image slices in a multi-scale way. Specifically, our method employs both parallel and serial of dilated convolution layers with different dilation rates to capture multi-scale semantic features. Moreover, we design graduated up-sampling layers with subpixel layers as the decoder to reconstruct lost spatial information and produce accurate segmentation masks. We validated our method using 164 T1 Mapping CMR images and showed that it outperforms the advanced convolutional neural network (CNN) models. In validation metrics, we archived the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) metric of 78.96%.