Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2024
Publisher
MDPI
Source Publication
Bioengineering
Source ISSN
2306-5354
Original Item ID
DOI: 10.3390/bioengineering11040319
Abstract
Organ segmentation from CT images is critical in the early diagnosis of diseases, progress monitoring, pre-operative planning, radiation therapy planning, and CT dose estimation. However, data limitation remains one of the main challenges in medical image segmentation tasks. This challenge is particularly huge in pediatric CT segmentation due to children’s heightened sensitivity to radiation. In order to address this issue, we propose a novel segmentation framework with a built-in auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (ACGAN) that conditions age, simultaneously generating additional features during training. The proposed conditional feature generation segmentation network (CFG-SegNet) was trained on a single loss function and used 2.5D segmentation batches. Our experiment was performed on a dataset with 359 subjects (180 male and 179 female) aged from 5 days to 16 years and a mean age of 7 years. CFG-SegNet achieved an average segmentation accuracy of 0.681 dice similarity coefficient (DSC) on the prostate, 0.619 DSC on the uterus, 0.912 DSC on the liver, and 0.832 DSC on the heart with four-fold cross-validation. We compared the segmentation accuracy of our proposed method with previously published U-Net results, and our network improved the segmentation accuracy by 2.7%, 2.6%, 2.8%, and 3.4% for the prostate, uterus, liver, and heart, respectively. The results indicate that our high-performing segmentation framework can more precisely segment organs when limited training images are available.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Gheshlaghi, Saba Heidari; Kan, Chi Nok Enoch; Schmidt, Taly Gilat; and Ye, Dong Hye, "Age Encoded Adversarial Learning for Pediatric CT Segmentation" (2024). Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications. 769.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/bioengin_fac/769
ADA Accessible Version
Comments
Published version. Bioengineering, Vol. 11, No. 4 (March 2024). DOI. © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).