BUSU-Net: An Ensemble U-Net Framework for Medical Image Segmentation
Department of Statistics and Applied Probability National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学统计与应用概率系)
Wei Hao Khoong
备注:
GitHub link to the model scripts and trained model weights can be found in the manuscript. Version 2: Added S-UNet's Mi-UNet results for comparison and reference
In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized medical image analysis. One of the most well-known CNN architectures in semantic segmentation is the U-net, which has achieved much success in several medical image segmentation applications. Also more recently, with the rise of autoML ad advancements in neural architecture search (NAS), methods like NAS-Unet have been proposed for NAS in medical image segmentation. In this paper, with inspiration from LadderNet, U-Net, autoML and NAS, we propose an ensemble deep neural network with an underlying U-Net framework consisting of bi-directional convolutional LSTMs and dense connections, where the first (from left) U-Net-like network is deeper than the second (from left). We show that this ensemble network outperforms recent state-of-the-art networks in several evaluation metrics, and also evaluate a lightweight version of this ensemble network, which also outperforms recent state-of-the-art networks in some evaluation metrics.
Segmentation is a critical step in medical image analysis. Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) have emerged as powerful segmentation models achieving state-of-the-art results in various medical image datasets. Network architectures are usually designed manually for a specific segmentation task so applying them to other medical datasets requires extensive experience and time. Moreover, the segmentation requires handling large volumetric data that results in big and complex architectures. Recently, methods that automatically design neural networks for medical image segmentation have been present…
University of Bucharest(布加勒斯特大学);“Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy(卡罗尔·达维拉医药大学)
Medical image segmentation is an actively studied task in medical imaging, where the precision of the annotations is of utter importance towards accurate diagnosis and treatment. In recent years, the task has been approached with various deep learning systems, among the most popular models being U-Net. In this work, we propose a novel strategy to generate ensembles of different architectures for medical image segmentation, by leveraging the diversity (decorrelation) of the models forming the ensemble. More specifically, we utilize the Dice score among model pairs to estimate the correlation be…
In recent years, deep learning has rapidly become a method of choice for the segmentation of medical images. Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures such as UNet have achieved state-of-the-art results on many medical datasets. To further improve the performance in the segmentation task, we develop an ensemble system which combines various deep learning architectures. We propose a two-layer ensemble of deep learning models for the segmentation of medical images. The prediction for each training image pixel made by each model in the first layer is used as the augmented data of the training image…
Detection of colon polyps has become a trending topic in the intersecting fields of machine learning and gastrointestinal endoscopy. The focus has mainly been on per-frame classification. More recently, polyp segmentation has gained attention in the medical community. Segmentation has the advantage of being more accurate than per-frame classification or object detection as it can show the affected area in greater detail. For our contribution to the EndoCV 2021 segmentation challenge, we propose two separate approaches. First, a segmentation model named TriUNet composed of three separate UNet m…
Dual-Teacher Ensemble Models with Double-Copy-Paste for 3D Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University(南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室);National Institute of Healthcare Data Science, Nanjing University(南京大学国家医疗数据科学研究院);Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications(Ministry of Education), Southeast University(东南大学新一代人工智能技术及交叉应用教育部重点实验室);School of Data and Computer Science, Shandong Women’s University(山东女子学院数据与计算机科学学院)
Despite the superior performance of Deep Learning (DL) on numerous segmentation tasks, the DL-based approaches are notoriously overconfident about their prediction with highly polarized label probability. This is often not desirable for many applications with the inherent label ambiguity even in human annotations. This challenge has been addressed by leveraging multiple annotations per image and the segmentation uncertainty. However, multiple per-image annotations are often not available in a real-world application and the uncertainty does not provide full control on segmentation results to us…
Institute of Computer Engineering, Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien)(维也纳工业大学(TU Wien)计算机工程研究所);Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi(纽约大学阿布扎比分校工程系)
Reliable classification and detection of certain medical conditions, in images, with state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks, require vast amounts of pixel-wise annotation. However, the public availability of such datasets is minimal. Therefore, semantic segmentation with image-level labels presents a promising alternative to this problem. Nevertheless, very few works have focused on evaluating this technique and its applicability to the medical sector. Due to their complexity and the small number of training examples in medical datasets, classifier-based weakly supervised networks lik…
Deep learning based image segmentation has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many medical applications such as lesion quantification, organ detection, etc. However, most of the methods rely on supervised learning, which require a large set of high-quality labeled data. Data annotation is generally an extremely time-consuming process. To address this problem, we propose a generic semi-supervised learning framework for image segmentation based on a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). An encoder-decoder based DCNN is initially trained using a few annotated training samples. This …
Medical University of Vienna(维也纳医科大学);Loughborough University(拉夫堡大学);TissueGnostics GmbH(TissueGnostics有限公司)
Foot ulcer is a common complication of diabetes mellitus and, associated with substantial morbidity and mortality, remains a major risk factor for lower leg amputations. Extracting accurate morphological features from foot wounds is crucial for appropriate treatment. Although visual inspection by a medical professional is the common approach for diagnosis, this is subjective and error-prone, and computer-aided approaches thus provide an interesting alternative. Deep learning-based methods, and in particular convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown excellent performance for various task…
Uncertainty estimation in deep learning has become a leading research field in medical image analysis due to the need for safe utilisation of AI algorithms in clinical practice. Most approaches for uncertainty estimation require sampling the network weights multiple times during testing or training multiple networks. This leads to higher training and testing costs in terms of time and computational resources. In this paper, we propose Layer Ensembles, a novel uncertainty estimation method that uses a single network and requires only a single pass to estimate predictive uncertainty of a network…
U-Net has been providing state-of-the-art performance in many medical image segmentation problems. Many modifications have been proposed for U-Net, such as attention U-Net, recurrent residual convolutional U-Net (R2-UNet), and U-Net with residual blocks or blocks with dense connections. However, all these modifications have an encoder-decoder structure with skip connections, and the number of paths for information flow is limited. We propose LadderNet in this paper, which can be viewed as a chain of multiple U-Nets. Instead of only one pair of encoder branch and decoder branch in U-Net, a Ladd…
University of Arkansas(阿肯色大学);Cyberlogitec Vietnam(越南赛博罗吉泰克公司);VinAI(越南人工智能研究院)
Capsule network is a recent new deep network architecture that has been applied successfully for medical image segmentation tasks. This work extends capsule networks for volumetric medical image segmentation with self-supervised learning. To improve on the problem of weight initialization compared to previous capsule networks, we leverage self-supervised learning for capsule networks pre-training, where our pretext-task is optimized by self-reconstruction. Our capsule network, SS-3DCapsNet, has a UNet-based architecture with a 3D Capsule encoder and 3D CNNs decoder. Our experiments on multiple…
MAMBO-NET: Multi-Causal Aware Modeling Backdoor-Intervention Optimization for Medical Image Segmentation Network
Tianjin University(天津大学);Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application(天津认知计算与应用重点实验室);Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking(天津先进网络重点实验室);Tianjin International Engineering Institute, Tianjin University(天津大学国际工程师学院);Tianjin Central Hospital of Gynecology Obstetrics(天津市中心妇产科医院);Silesian University of Technology(西里西亚工业大学);University of Alberta(阿尔伯塔大学);Istinye University(伊斯坦布尔耶尼大学)
School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia(马来西亚理科大学计算机科学学院);School of Network Communication, Zhejiang Yuexiu University(浙江越秀外国语学院网络传播学院)
Medical images often exhibit low and blurred contrast between lesions and surrounding tissues, with considerable variation in lesion edges and shapes even within the same disease, leading to significant challenges in segmentation. Therefore, precise segmentation of lesions has become an essential prerequisite for patient condition assessment and formulation of treatment plans. Significant achievements have been made in research related to the U-Net model in recent years. It improves segmentation performance and is extensively applied in the semantic segmentation of medical images to offer tech…
SimulaMet;UiT The Arctic University of Norway(挪威北极大学);Oslo Metropolitan University(奥斯陆城市大学)
Semantic image segmentation is the process of labeling each pixel of an image with its corresponding class. An encoder-decoder based approach, like U-Net and its variants, is a popular strategy for solving medical image segmentation tasks. To improve the performance of U-Net on various segmentation tasks, we propose a novel architecture called DoubleU-Net, which is a combination of two U-Net architectures stacked on top of each other. The first U-Net uses a pre-trained VGG-19 as the encoder, which has already learned features from ImageNet and can be transferred to another task easily. To capt…
Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine(大阪大学医学研究生院)
Multi-organ segmentation enables organ evaluation, accounts the relationship between multiple organs, and facilitates accurate diagnosis and treatment decisions. However, only few models can perform segmentation accurately because of the lack of datasets and computational resources. On AMOS2022 challenge, which is a large-scale, clinical, and diverse abdominal multiorgan segmentation benchmark, we trained a 3D-UNet model with large batch and patch sizes using multi-GPU distributed training. Segmentation performance tended to increase for models with large batch and patch sizes compared with th…
National Institute of Technology Karnataka(卡纳塔克邦国家技术研究所)
Computer-aided medical image analysis plays a significant role in assisting medical practitioners for expert clinical diagnosis and deciding the optimal treatment plan. At present, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the preferred choice for medical image analysis. In addition, with the rapid advancements in three-dimensional (3D) imaging systems and the availability of excellent hardware and software support to process large volumes of data, 3D deep learning methods are gaining popularity in medical image analysis. Here, we present an extensive review of the recently evolved 3D deep learn…
The paper is a short review of medical image segmentation using U-Net and its variants. As we understand going through a medical images is not an easy job for any clinician either radiologist or pathologist. Analysing medical images is the only way to perform non-invasive diagnosis. Segmenting out the regions of interest has significant importance in medical images and is key for diagnosis. This paper also gives a bird eye view of how medical image segmentation has evolved. Also discusses challenge's and success of the deep neural architectures. Following how different hybrid architectures hav…
Università di Bologna(博洛尼亚大学);University of Padua(帕多瓦大学)
Semantic segmentation has a wide array of applications ranging from medical-image analysis, scene understanding, autonomous driving and robotic navigation. This work deals with medical image segmentation and in particular with accurate polyp detection and segmentation during colonoscopy examinations. Several convolutional neural network architectures have been proposed to effectively deal with this task and with the problem of segmenting objects at different scale input. The basic architecture in image segmentation consists of an encoder and a decoder: the first uses convolutional filters to e…
University of California, Los Angeles(加州大学洛杉矶分校);NVIDIA(英伟达)
Fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven to be effective at representing and classifying textural information, thus transforming image intensity into output class masks that achieve semantic image segmentation. In medical image analysis, however, expert manual segmentation often relies on the boundaries of anatomical structures of interest. We propose boundary aware CNNs for medical image segmentation. Our networks are designed to account for organ boundary information, both by providing a special network edge branch and edge-aware loss terms, and they are trainable end-to-end. W…
In this paper, we propose a novel medical image segmentation using iterative deep learning framework. We have combined an iterative learning approach and an encoder-decoder network to improve segmentation results, which enables to precisely localize the regions of interest (ROIs) including complex shapes or detailed textures of medical images in an iterative manner. The proposed iterative deep convolutional encoder-decoder network consists of two main paths: convolutional encoder path and convolutional decoder path with iterative learning. Experimental results show that the proposed iterative …
Recent advances of semantic image segmentation greatly benefit from deeper and larger Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. Compared to image segmentation in the wild, properties of both medical images themselves and of existing medical datasets hinder training deeper and larger models because of overfitting. To this end, we propose a novel two-stream UNET architecture for automatic end-to-end medical image segmentation, in which intensity value and gradient vector flow (GVF) are two inputs for each stream, respectively. We demonstrate that two-stream CNNs with more low-level features gre…
The shapes and morphology of the organs and tissues are important prior knowledge in medical imaging recognition and segmentation. The morphological operation is a well-known method for morphological feature extraction. As the morphological operation is performed well in hand-crafted image segmentation techniques, it is also promising to design an approach to approximate morphological operation in the convolutional networks. However, using the traditional convolutional neural network as a black-box is usually hard to specify the morphological operation action. Here, we introduced a 3D morpholo…
We propose a novel technique to incorporate attention within convolutional neural networks using feature maps generated by a separate convolutional autoencoder. Our attention architecture is well suited for incorporation with deep convolutional networks. We evaluate our model on benchmark segmentation datasets in skin cancer segmentation and lung lesion segmentation. Results show highly competitive performance when compared with U-Net and it's residual variant.
Accurate and fast segmentation of medical images is clinically essential, yet current research methods include convolutional neural networks with fast inference speed but difficulty in learning image contextual features, and transformer with good performance but high hardware requirements. In this paper, we present a Patch Network (PNet) that incorporates the Swin Transformer notion into a convolutional neural network, allowing it to gather richer contextual information while achieving the balance of speed and accuracy. We test our PNet on Polyp(CVC-ClinicDB and ETIS- LaribPolypDB), Skin(ISIC-…
Deep learning techniques have successfully been employed in numerous computer vision tasks including image segmentation. The techniques have also been applied to medical image segmentation, one of the most critical tasks in computer-aided diagnosis. Compared with natural images, the medical image is a gray-scale image with low-contrast (even with some invisible parts). Because some organs have similar intensity and texture with neighboring organs, there is usually a need to refine automatic segmentation results. In this paper, we propose an interactive deep refinement framework to improve the …
Indian Institute of Technology Madras(印度理工学院马德拉斯分校)
Deep fully convolutional neural network (FCN) based architectures have shown great potential in medical image segmentation. However, such architectures usually have millions of parameters and inadequate number of training samples leading to over-fitting and poor generalization. In this paper, we present a novel highly parameter and memory efficient FCN based architecture for medical image analysis. We propose a novel up-sampling path which incorporates long skip and short-cut connections to overcome the feature map explosion in FCN like architectures. In order to processes the input images at …
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications(北京邮电大学);Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所)
With the development of deep convolutional neural networks, medical image segmentation has achieved a series of breakthroughs in recent years. However, the high-performance convolutional neural networks always mean numerous parameters and high computation costs, which will hinder the applications in clinical scenarios. Meanwhile, the scarceness of large-scale annotated medical image datasets further impedes the application of high-performance networks. To tackle these problems, we propose Graph Flow, a comprehensive knowledge distillation framework, for both network-efficiency and annotation-e…
Xi’an University of Posts&Telecommunications(西安邮电大学);Xidian University(西安电子科技大学)
The Resolution of feature maps is critical for medical image segmentation. Most of the existing Transformer-based networks for medical image segmentation are U-Net-like architecture that contains an encoder that utilizes a sequence of Transformer blocks to convert the input medical image from high-resolution representation into low-resolution feature maps and a decoder that gradually recovers the high-resolution representation from low-resolution feature maps. Unlike previous studies, in this paper, we utilize the network design style from the High-Resolution Network (HRNet), replace the convo…
VLSM-Ensemble: Ensembling CLIP-based Vision-Language Models for Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation
Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, DCU, Dublin, Ireland(爱尔兰洞察研究爱尔兰数据分析中心,都柏林大学,都柏林);Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning, DCU, Dublin, Ireland(爱尔兰研究爱尔兰机器学习研究培训中心,都柏林大学,都柏林);School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland(计算学院,都柏林城市大学,都柏林)
University of Cambridge(剑桥大学);Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre(英国癌症研究中心剑桥中心);Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute(英国癌症研究中心剑桥研究所);Danube Private University(多瑙河私立大学);KTH Royal Institute of Technology(KTH皇家理工学院)
Uncertainty quantification in automated image analysis is highly desired in many applications. Typically, machine learning models in classification or segmentation are only developed to provide binary answers; however, quantifying the uncertainty of the models can play a critical role for example in active learning or machine human interaction. Uncertainty quantification is especially difficult when using deep learning-based models, which are the state-of-the-art in many imaging applications. The current uncertainty quantification approaches do not scale well in high-dimensional real-world pro…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学);Sichuan Cancer Hospital and Institute(四川省肿瘤医院·研究所)
Radiotherapy is the main treatment modality for nasopharynx cancer. Delineation of Gross Target Volume (GTV) from medical images such as CT and MRI images is a prerequisite for radiotherapy. As manual delineation is time-consuming and laborious, automatic segmentation of GTV has a potential to improve this process. Currently, most of the deep learning-based automatic delineation methods of GTV are mainly performed on medical images like CT images. However, it is challenged by the low contrast between the pathology regions and surrounding soft tissues, small target region, and anisotropic resol…
AmbientCycleGAN for Establishing Interpretable Stochastic Object Models Based on Mathematical Phantoms and Medical Imaging Measurements
Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学未来科技研究院);University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学密歇根大学联合学院)
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential in clinical applications, providing valuable medical knowledge and advice. For example, a large dialog LLM like ChatGPT has successfully passed part of the US medical licensing exam. However, LLMs currently have difficulty processing images, making it challenging to interpret information from medical images, which are rich in information that supports clinical decisions. On the other hand, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) networks for medical images have seen significant success in the medical field by using advanced deep-le…
Large annotated datasets are required to train segmentation networks. In medical imaging, it is often difficult, time consuming and expensive to create such datasets, and it may also be difficult to share these datasets with other researchers. Different AI models can today generate very realistic synthetic images, which can potentially be openly shared as they do not belong to specific persons. However, recent work has shown that using synthetic images for training deep networks often leads to worse performance compared to using real images. Here we demonstrate that using synthetic images and …
École de Technologie Supérieure(高等技术学院);Université de Sherbrooke(舍布鲁克大学)
This paper presents a client/server privacy-preserving network in the context of multicentric medical image analysis. Our approach is based on adversarial learning which encodes images to obfuscate the patient identity while preserving enough information for a target task. Our novel architecture is composed of three components: 1) an encoder network which removes identity-specific features from input medical images, 2) a discriminator network that attempts to identify the subject from the encoded images, 3) a medical image analysis network which analyzes the content of the encoded images (segm…
University of Sydney(悉尼大学);University of New South Wales(新南威尔士大学)
General point clouds have been increasingly investigated for different tasks, and recently Transformer-based networks are proposed for point cloud analysis. However, there are barely related works for medical point clouds, which are important for disease detection and treatment. In this work, we propose an attention-based model specifically for medical point clouds, namely 3D medical point Transformer (3DMedPT), to examine the complex biological structures. By augmenting contextual information and summarizing local responses at query, our attention module can capture both local context and glo…
Most advances in medical lesion detection network are limited to subtle modification on the conventional detection network designed for natural images. However, there exists a vast domain gap between medical images and natural images where the medical image detection often suffers from several domain-specific challenges, such as high lesion/background similarity, dominant tiny lesions, and severe class imbalance. Is a hand-crafted detection network tailored for natural image undoubtedly good enough over a discrepant medical lesion domain? Is there more powerful operations, filters, and sub-net…
Manipal Institute of Technology(马尼帕尔理工学院);University of Groningen(格罗宁根大学)
Trusting the predictions of deep learning models in safety critical settings such as the medical domain is still not a viable option. Distentangled uncertainty quantification in the field of medical imaging has received little attention. In this paper, we study disentangled uncertainties in image to image translation tasks in the medical domain. We compare multiple uncertainty quantification methods, namely Ensembles, Flipout, Dropout, and DropConnect, while using CycleGAN to convert T1-weighted brain MRI scans to T2-weighted brain MRI scans. We further evaluate uncertainty behavior in the pre…
The sharing of medical imaging datasets between institutions, and even inside the same institution, is limited by various regulations/legal barriers. Although these limitations are necessities for protecting patient privacy and setting strict boundaries for data ownership, medical research projects that require large datasets suffer considerably as a result. Machine learning has been revolutionized with the emerging deep neural network approaches over recent years, making the data-related limitations even a larger problem as these novel techniques commonly require immense imaging datasets. Thi…
CitAI Research Centre(CitAI研究中心);City, University of London(伦敦城市大学);BioMedIA(生物医学影像分析组);Imperial College(帝国理工学院)
U-Net has been the go-to architecture for medical image segmentation tasks, however computational challenges arise when extending the U-Net architecture to 3D images. We propose the Implicit U-Net architecture that adapts the efficient Implicit Representation paradigm to supervised image segmentation tasks. By combining a convolutional feature extractor with an implicit localization network, our implicit U-Net has 40% less parameters than the equivalent U-Net. Moreover, we propose training and inference procedures to capitalize sparse predictions. When comparing to an equivalent fully convolut…
University of New South Wales(新南威尔士大学);Stanford University(斯坦福大学);Lehigh University(理海大学)
The shortage of annotated medical images is one of the biggest challenges in the field of medical image computing. Without a sufficient number of training samples, deep learning based models are very likely to suffer from over-fitting problem. The common solution is image manipulation such as image rotation, cropping, or resizing. Those methods can help relieve the over-fitting problem as more training samples are introduced. However, they do not really introduce new images with additional information and may lead to data leakage as the test set may contain similar samples which appear in the …
Purdue University Northwest(普渡大学西北校区);Michigan Technological University(密歇根理工大学)
U-net is an image segmentation technique developed primarily for medical image analysis that can precisely segment images using a scarce amount of training data. These traits provide U-net with a very high utility within the medical imaging community and have resulted in extensive adoption of U-net as the primary tool for segmentation tasks in medical imaging. The success of U-net is evident in its widespread use in all major image modalities from CT scans and MRI to X-rays and microscopy. Furthermore, while U-net is largely a segmentation tool, there have been instances of the use of U-net in…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are unsupervised Deep Learning approach in the computer vision community which has gained significant attention from the last few years in identifying the internal structure of multimodal medical imaging data. The adversarial network simultaneously generates realistic medical images and corresponding annotations, which proven to be useful in many cases such as image augmentation, image registration, medical image generation, image reconstruction, and image-to-image translation. These properties bring the attention of the researcher in the field of medical…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学);Institute of Electronic and Information Engineering of UESTC in Guangdong(电子科技大学广东电子信息工程研究院);National Natural Science Foundation of China(国家自然科学基金委员会)
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) can connect many medical imaging equipments to the medical information network to facilitate the process of diagnosing and treating for doctors. As medical image contains sensitive information, it is of importance yet very challenging to safeguard the privacy or security of the patient. In this work, a deep learning based encryption and decryption network (DeepEDN) is proposed to fulfill the process of encrypting and decrypting the medical image. Specifically, in DeepEDN, the Cycle-Generative Adversarial Network (Cycle-GAN) is employed as the main learning net…
In our former works we have made serious efforts to improve the performance of medical image analysis methods with using ensemble-based systems. In this paper, we present a novel hardware-based solution for the efficient adoption of our complex, fusion-based approaches for real-time applications. Even though most of the image processing problems and the increasing amount of data have high-performance computing(HPC) demand, there is still a lack of corresponding dedicated HPC solutions for several medical tasks. To widen this bottleneck we have developed a Hybrid Small Size high performance com…
UNSW(新南威尔士大学);Dongguk University(东国大学);Defence Science and Technology Group(国防科学技术集团)
Image segmentation is an important task in medical imaging. It constitutes the backbone of a wide variety of clinical diagnostic methods, treatments, and computer-aided surgeries. In this paper, we propose a multi-kernel image segmentation net (MKIS-Net), which uses multiple kernels to create an efficient receptive field and enhance segmentation performance. As a result of its multi-kernel design, MKIS-Net is a light-weight architecture with a small number of trainable parameters. Moreover, these multi-kernel receptive fields also contribute to better segmentation results. We demonstrate the e…
Segmentation of the liver from 3D computer tomography (CT) images is one of the most frequently performed operations in medical image analysis. In the past decade, Deep Learning Models (DMs) have offered significant improvements over previous methods for liver segmentation. The success of DMs is usually owed to the user's expertise in deep learning as well as to intricate training procedures. The need for bespoke expertise limits the reproducibility of empirical studies involving DMs. Today's consensus is that an ensemble of DMs works better than the individual component DMs. In this study we …