Uncertainty Driven Bottleneck Attention U-Net for Organ at Risk Segmentation

Abstract

Organ at risk (OAR) segmentation in computed tomography (CT) imagery is a difficult task for automated segmentation methods and can be crucial for downstream radiation treatment planning. U-net has become a de-facto standard for medical image segmentation and is frequently used as a common baseline in medical image segmentation tasks. In this paper, we propose a multiple decoder U-net architecture and use the segmentation disagreement between the decoders as attention to the bottleneck of the network for segmentation refinement. While feature correlation is considered as attention in most cases, in our case it is the uncertainty from the network used as attention. For accurate segmentation, we also proposed a CT intensity integrated regularization loss. Proposed regularisation helps model understand the intensity distribution of low contrast tissues. We tested our model on two publicly available OAR challenge datasets. We also conducted the ablation on each datasets with the proposed attention module and regularization loss. Experimental results demonstrate a clear accuracy improvement on both datasets.

Publication
In International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging
Abdullah Nazib
Abdullah Nazib
Senior ML Engineer

My research interests include Medical Imaging, Recommendation systems.

Riad Hassan
Riad Hassan
Lecturer

My research interests include Deep Learning, to be more specific in Medical Imaging.

Zahidul Islam
Zahidul Islam
Professor

My research interests include computer vision, 3D object recognition, human and motion tracking, tracking articulated bodies.