Automatic heart segmentation based on convolutional networks using attention mechanism

Heart segmentation is challenging due to the poor image contrast of heart in the CT images. Since manual segmentation of the heart is tedious and time-consuming, we propose an attention-based Convolution Neural Network (CNN) for heart segmentation. First, one-hot preprocessing is performed on the multi-tissue CT images. U-Net network with Attention-gate is then applied to obtain the heart region. We compared our method with several CNN methods in terms of dice coefficient. Results show that our method outperforms other methods for segmentation.