Supervised deep segmentation network for brain extraction

Recent past has seen an inexorable shift towards the use of deep learning techniques to solve a myriad of problems in the field of medical imaging. In this paper, a novel segmentation method involving a fully-connected deep neural network called Deep Segmentation Network (DSN) is proposed to perform supervised regression for brain extraction from T1-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images. In contrast to the existing patch-based feature learning techniques, DSN works on full 3D volumes, simplifying pre- and post-processing operations, to efficiently provide a voxel-wise binary mask delineating the brain region. The model is evaluated using three publicly available datasets and is observed to either outdo or perform comparably to the state-of-the-art methods. DSN is able to achieve a maximum and minimum Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 97.57 and 92.82 respectively across all the datasets. Experiments conducted in this paper highlight the ability of the DSN model to automatically learn feature representations; making it a simple yet highly effective approach for brain segmentation. Preliminary experiments also suggest that the proposed model has the potential to segment sub-cortical structures accurately.