Fully automated esophagus segmentation with a hierarchical deep learning approach

Segmentation of organs at risk in CT volumes is a prerequisite for radiotherapy treatment planning. In this paper we focus on esophagus segmentation, a challenging problem since the walls of the esophagus have a very low contrast in CT images. Making use of Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN), we present several extensions that improve the performance, including a new architecture that allows to use low level features with high level information, effectively combining local and global information for improving the localization accuracy. Experiments demonstrate competitive performance on a dataset of 30 CT scans.