Enhancement Mask for Hippocampus Detection and Segmentation

Detection and segmentation of the hippocampal structures in volumetric brain images is a challenging problem in the area of medical imaging. In this paper, we propose a two-stage 3D fully convolutional neural network that efficiently detects and segments the hippocampal structures. In particular, our approach first localizes the hippocampus from the whole volumetric image and obtains a rough segmentation. This initial segmentation can be used an enhancement mask to extract the fine structure of the hippocampus. The proposed method has been evaluated on a public dataset and compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which yields mean Dice Similarity Coefficients (i.e. DSC) of 0.897 and 0.900 for the left and right hippocampus, respectively. Furthermore, extensive experiments manifest that the proposed enhancement mask layer has remarkable benefits for accelerating training process and obtaining more accurate segmentation results.