Multi-Task Learning for Left Atrial Segmentation on GE-MRI

Abstract: Segmentation of the left atrium (LA) is crucial for assessing its anatomy in both pre-operative atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation planning and post-operative follow-up studies. In this paper, we present a fully automated framework for left atrial segmentation in gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance images (GE-MRI) based on deep learning. We propose a fully convolutional neural network and explore the benefits of multi-task learning for performing both atrial segmentation and pre/post ablation classification. Our results show that, by sharing features between related tasks, the network can gain additional anatomical information and achieve more accurate atrial segmentation, leading to a mean Dice score of 0.901 on a test set of 20 3D MRI images. Code of our proposed algorithm is available at https://github.com/cherise215/atria_segmentation_2018/.