Automatic combination strategy search in segmentation of Cardiac T1 mapping image

Fusion of multiple medical images may improve image quality and ease feature extraction for the diagnosis and therapy of diseases. In cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images T1 mapping, multiple MR images are reconstructed for the estimation of T1 mapping; therefore, heart myocardium should be segmented from images for further analysis using T1 values. Traditionally, segmentation is performed for each image separately, and the per-image segmentation results are combined in a complicated way to get a final segmentation result. Traditional combination methods require the segmentation results of all images satisfy certain criteria, and therefore often fail because of low image quality. However, it is very difficult to design a combination strategy to integrate the information of multiple images for segmentation. In this study, we designed the Segfuse network based on convolutional neural networks to get strategies for improving the segmentation performance of T1 mapping images even when some images were of low quality. After validating with 112 images from 42 subjects, the segmentation accuracy based on the Segfuse had a mean dice of 80.2%, nearly equivalent to that of a traditional method.