Left and Right Ventricular Segmentation Based on 3D Region-Aware U-Net

Abstract

The cardiac is one of the essential organs, and the segmentation of the left and right ventricular of cardiac is essential in diagnosing various heart diseases. The most popular method for the segmentation of 3D MRI images is the nnUNet. However, the 3D MRI volume of the ventricular contains other organs which interfere with the segmentation of the ventricular. Hence, we proposed a novel region-aware U-Net segmentation method RegUNet for ventricular segmentation. RegUNet improves the ventricular's segmentation performance by first capturing the region of interest (RoI) of the ventricular and then segmenting the ventricular with the captured RoI features, which reduces the segmentation module's difficulty by keeping the cardiac's features and leaving others such that RegUNet can focus on ventricular segmentation. Besides, since the model segments the ventricular with the captured RoI features, it saves the model's computing resources from identifying the background of the volume. Since 3D cardiac MRI volumes scanned by the different devices have diverse statistical characteristics, which causes the model's performance in processing the multi-source cardiac volumes to be unstable. We stabilize the model's performance with a multi-sources feature normalization strategy, which normalizes the feature from a different source with different parameters. We validated the proposed method on the M&MS dataset, a multi-sources 3D MRI cardiac segmentation dataset. Experiments showed that RegUNet's segmentation ability reached the state-of-the-art.