We consider the problem of segmenting a biomedical image into anatomical
regions of interest. We specifically address the frequent scenario where we
have no paired training data that contains images and their manual
segmentations. Instead, we employ unpaired segmentation images to build an
anatomical prior. Critically these segmentations can be derived from imaging
data from a different dataset and imaging modality than the current task. We
introduce a generative probabilistic model that employs the learned prior
through a convolutional neural network to compute segmentations in an
unsupervised setting. We conducted an empirical analysis of the proposed
approach in the context of structural brain MRI segmentation, using a
multi-study dataset of more than 14,000 scans. Our results show that an
anatomical prior can enable fast unsupervised segmentation which is typically
not possible using standard convolutional networks. The integration of
anatomical priors can facilitate CNN-based anatomical segmentation in a range
of novel clinical problems, where few or no annotations are available and thus
standard networks are not trainable. The code is freely available at
http://github.com/adalca/neuron.Comment: Presented at CVPR 2018. IEEE CVPR proceedings pp. 9290-929