Automatic Segmentation of Anatomical Areas in X-ray Images Based on Fully Convolutional Networks / 中国医疗器械杂志

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE@#Medical image segmentation is a key step in medical image processing. An architecture of fully convolutional networks was proposed to realize automatic segmentation of anatomical areas in X-ray images.@*METHODS@#Enlightened by the advantages of convolutional neural networks on features extraction, fully convolutional networks consisting of 9 layers were designed to segment medical images. The networks used convolution kernels of various sizes to extract multi-dimensional image features in the images, meanwhile, eliminated pooling layers to avoid the loss of image details during downsampling procedures.@*RESULTS@#The experiment was conducted in accordance with the specific scene of X-ray images segmentation. Compared with traditional segmentation methods, this approach achieved more accurate segmentation of anatomical areas.@*CONCLUSIONS@#Fully convolutional networks can extract representative and multidimensional features of medical images, avoid the loss of image details during downsampling procedures, and complete automatic segmentation of anatomical areas accurately in X-ray images.