CE-Net: Context Encoder Network for 2D Medical Image Segmentation

Zaiwang Gu, Jun Cheng, Huazhu Fu, Kang Zhou, Huaying Hao, Yitian Zhao, Tianyang Zhang, Shenghua Gao, Jiang Liu

Research output: Journal PublicationArticlepeer-review

1352 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Medical image segmentation is an important step in medical image analysis. With the rapid development of a convolutional neural network in image processing, deep learning has been used for medical image segmentation, such as optic disc segmentation, blood vessel detection, lung segmentation, cell segmentation, and so on. Previously, U-net based approaches have been proposed. However, the consecutive pooling and strided convolutional operations led to the loss of some spatial information. In this paper, we propose a context encoder network (CE-Net) to capture more high-level information and preserve spatial information for 2D medical image segmentation. CE-Net mainly contains three major components: A feature encoder module, a context extractor, and a feature decoder module. We use the pretrained ResNet block as the fixed feature extractor. The context extractor module is formed by a newly proposed dense atrous convolution block and a residual multi-kernel pooling block. We applied the proposed CE-Net to different 2D medical image segmentation tasks. Comprehensive results show that the proposed method outperforms the original U-Net method and other state-of-the-art methods for optic disc segmentation, vessel detection, lung segmentation, cell contour segmentation, and retinal optical coherence tomography layer segmentation.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8662594
Pages (from-to)2281-2292
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Volume38
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Medical image segmentation
  • context encoder network
  • deep learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Radiological and Ultrasound Technology
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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