Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Segmentation from CT Images using Modified 3D U-Net with Deep Supervision

An abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a dangerous cardiovascular disease that can cause serious health complications and death. Methods that can provide automatic and accurate segmentation of the AAA can significantly help in preoperative planning and postoperative follow-ups. Therefore, in this work, we present an automatic method for AAA segmentation from CT images using a modified 3D U-Net network with deep supervision. We compare obtained results for AAA segmentation using original 3D U-Net, and modified 3D U-Net with deep supervision. The trained network is evaluated on 19 volumetric CT images from the publicly available dataset provided by the University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium, using four-fold cross-validation. We obtained DSC of 91.03% using modified 3D U-Net with deep supervision. Additionally, we provide a discussion of the effects of using up-sampling versus deconvolution layers and its influence on the performance of both networks for this specific clinical application.