Volume R-CNN: Unified Framework for CT Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

As a fundamental task in computer vision, object detection methods for the 2D image such as Faster R-CNN and SSD can be efficiently trained end-to-end. However, current methods for volumetric data like computed tomography (CT) usually contain two steps to do region proposal and classification separately. In this work, we present a unified framework called Volume R-CNN for object detection in volumetric data. Volume R-CNN is an end-to-end method that could perform region proposal, classification and instance segmentation all in one model, which dramatically reduces computational overhead and parameter numbers. These tasks are joined using a key component named RoIAlign3D that extracts features of RoIs smoothly and works superiorly well for small objects in the 3D image. To the best of our knowledge, Volume R-CNN is the first common end-to-end framework for both object detection and instance segmentation in CT. Without bells and whistles, our single model achieves remarkable results in LUNA16. Ablation experiments are conducted to analyze the effectiveness of our method.