Global Deep Learning Methods for Multimodality Isointense Infant Brain Image Segmentation

An important step in early brain development study is to perform automatic segmentation of infant brain magnetic resonance (MR) images into cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) regions. This task is especially challenging in the isointense stage (approximately 6-8 months of age) when GM and WM exhibit similar levels of intensities in MR images. Deep learning has shown its great promise in various image segmentation tasks. However, existing models do not have an efficient and effective way to aggregate global information. They also suffer from information loss during up-sampling operations. In this work, we address these problems by proposing a global aggregation block, which can be flexibly used for global information fusion. We build a novel model based on 3D U-Net to make fast and accurate voxel-wise dense prediction. We perform thorough experiments, and results indicate that our model outperforms previous best models significantly on 3D multimodality isointense infant brain MR image segmentation.