In this paper, we propose a fully automatic MRI cardiac segmentation method
based on a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for the 2017
ACDC MICCAI challenge. The novelty of our network comes with its embedded shape
prior and its loss function tailored to the cardiac anatomy. Our model includes
a cardiac centerof-mass regression module which allows for an automatic shape
prior registration. Also, since our method processes raw MR images without any
manual preprocessing and/or image cropping, our CNN learns both high-level
features (useful to distinguish the heart from other organs with a similar
shape) and low-level features (useful to get accurate segmentation results).
Those features are learned with a multi-resolution conv-deconv "grid"
architecture which can be seen as an extension of the U-Net. Experimental
results reveal that our method can segment the left and right ventricles as
well as the myocardium from a 3D MRI cardiac volume in 0.4 second with an
average Dice coefficient of 0.90 and an average Hausdorff distance of 10.4 mm.Comment: 8 pages, 1 tables, 2 figure