3D Pyramid Pooling Network for Abdominal MRI Series Classification

Recognizing and organizing different series in an MRI examination is important both for clinical review and research, but it is poorly addressed by the current generation of picture archiving and communication systems (PACSs) and post-processing workstations. In this paper, we study the problem of using deep convolutional neural networks for automatic classification of abdominal MRI series to one of many series types. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we created a large abdominal MRI dataset containing 3717 MRI series including 188,665 individual images, derived from liver examinations. 30 different series types are represented in this dataset. The dataset was annotated by consensus readings from two radiologists. Both the MRIs and the annotations were made publicly available. Second, we proposed a 3D pyramid pooling network, which can elegantly handle abdominal MRI series with varied sizes of each dimension, and achieved state-of-the-art classification performance. Third, we performed the first ever comparison between the algorithm and the radiologists on an additional dataset and had several meaningful findings.