A Multi-Resolution Deep Forest Framework with Hybrid Feature Fusion for CT Whole Heart Segmentation

Cardiac medical image segmentation plays an important role in the diagnosis and clinical treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, due to the variability of cardiac anatomy and the ambiguity between cardiac substructures, it is still difficult to quickly segment the entire heart from medical images. Most of the current researches utilize neural network structure to perform whole heart segmentation. Although good segmentation accuracy has been achieved, it usually requires a long training time. This paper aims to build a new whole heart segmentation model based on Deep Forest, called Multi-Resolution Deep Forest Framework(MRDFF), which performs segmentation through two stages. In the first stage, the heart region is located by rough binary classification, and similarity screening is used to reduce redundancy. The second stage subdivides the heart substructures based on the results of the first stage and uses multi-scale fusion to achieve high segmentation accuracy. The experimental results conducted on the public data set MM-WHS show that under the same training data and configuration, our model can be trained in only 4.5 hours, which is about 1/2 of the training time of neural network models, and can reach the accuracy not lower than neural network models, which shows the feasibility and efficiency of our model. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xufeixf/MRDFF.