Hippocampus segmentation through multi-view ensemble ConvNets

Abstract

Automated segmentation of brain structures from MR images is an important practice in many neuroimage studies. In this paper, we explore the utilization of a multi-view ensemble approach that relies on neural networks (NN) to combine multiple decision maps in achieving accurate hippocampus segmentation. Constructed under a general convolutional NN structure, our Ensemble-Net networks explore different convolution configurations to capture the complementary information residing in the multiple label probabilities produced by our U-Seg-Net (a modified U-Net) segmentation neural network. T1-weighted MRI scans and the associated Hippocampal masks of 110 healthy subjects from the ADNI project were used as the training and testing data. The combined U-Seg-Net + Ensemble-Net framework achieves over 89% Dice ratio on the test dataset.