Prostate segmentation with encoder-decoder densely connected convolutional network (ed-densenet)

Prostate cancer is a leading cause of mortality among men. Prostate segmentation of Magnetic Resonance (MR) images plays a critical role in treatment planning and image guided interventions. However, manual delineation of prostate is very time-consuming and subjects to large inter-observer variations. To deal with this problem, we proposed a novel Encoder-Decoder Densely Connected Convolutional Network (ED-DenseNet) to segment prostate region automatically. Our model consists of two interconnected pathways, a dense encoder pathway, which learns discriminative high-level image features and a dense decoder pathway, which predicts the final segmentation in the pixel level. Instead of using the convolutional network as the basic unit in the encoder-decoder framework, we utilize Densely Connected Convolutional Network (DenseNet) to preserve the maximum information flow among layers by a densely-connected mechanism. In addition, a novel loss function that jointly considers the encoder-decoder reconstruction error and the prediction error is proposed to optimize the feature learning and segmentation result. Our automatic segmentation result shows high agreement (DSC 87.14%) to the clinical segmentation results by experienced radiation oncologists. In addition, comparison with state-of-the-art methods shows that our ED-DenseNet model is superior in segmentation performance.