Medical Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Image segmentation plays an essential role in medical image analysis as it provides automated delineation of specific anatomical structures of interest and further enables many downstream tasks such as shape analysis and volume measurement. In particular, the rapid development of deep learning techniques in recent years has had a substantial impact in boosting the performance of segmentation algorithms by efficiently leveraging large amounts of labeled data to optimize complex models (supervised learning). However, the difficulty of obtaining manual labels for training can be a major obstacle for the implementation of learning-based methods for medical images. To address this problem, researchers have investigated many semi-supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to relax the labeling requirements. In this chapter, we present the basic ideas for deep learning-based segmentation as well as some current state-of-the-art approaches, organized by supervision type. Our goal is to provide the reader with some possible solutions for model selection, training strategies, and data manipulation given a specific segmentation task and dataset.