Hybrid Cascaded Neural Network for Liver Lesion Segmentation

Abstract: Automatic liver lesion segmentation is a challenging task while having a significant impact on assisting medical professionals in the designing of effective treatment and planning proper care. In this paper we propose a cascaded system that combines both 2D and 3D convolutional neural networks to effectively segment hepatic lesions. Our 2D network operates on a slice by slice basis to segment the liver and larger tumors, while we use a 3D network to detect small lesions that are often missed in a 2D segmentation design. We employ this algorithm on the LiTS challenge obtaining a Dice score per case of 68.1%, which performs the best among all non pre-trained models and the second best among published methods. We also perform two-fold cross-validation to reveal the over- and under-segmentation issues in the LiTS annotations.