Pathological Pulmonary Lobe Segmentation from CT Images using Progressive Holistically Nested Neural Networks and Random Walker

Abstract: Automatic pathological pulmonary lobe segmentation(PPLS) enables regional analyses of lung disease, a clinically important capability. Due to often incomplete lobe boundaries, PPLS is difficult even for experts, and most prior art requires inference from contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel PPLS method that couples deep learning with the random walker (RW) algorithm. We first employ the recent progressive holistically-nested network (P-HNN) model to identify potential lobar boundaries, then generate final segmentations using a RW that is seeded and weighted by the P-HNN output. We are the first to apply deep learning to PPLS. The advantages are independence from prior airway/vessel segmentations, increased robustness in diseased lungs, and methodological simplicity that does not sacrifice accuracy. Our method posts a high mean Jaccard score of 0.888$\pm$0.164 on a held-out set of 154 CT scans from lung-disease patients, while also significantly (p < 0.001) outperforming a state-of-the-art method.