Learning anisotropy and asymmetry geometric features for medical image segmentation

Abstract

Finding contours of interest from medical images is an important task in the field of medical image analysis. The current deep learning-based image segmentation approaches have obtained promising results. However, most of these models do not take into account the anisotropy and asymmetric features which play an important role in describing the target contours. In order to address this issue, we propose new loss-function applied to the deep learning model with dense distance regression, which can benefit the edge-based features, thus able to improve the stability of the segmentation procedure and to reduce the probability of outliers in the segmentation results. The introduced loss function is embedded into the deep learning model, which can perform an end-to-end image segmentation procedure for medical images. Ablation experiments were done with other loss functions and three datasets were used to verify whether this loss function is effective. SOTA results were obtained for the proposed loss function in this paper compared to the recently designed method for reducing the boundary error.