Dopnet: Densely Oriented Pooling Network For Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Since manual annotation of medical images is time consuming for clinical experts, reliable automatic segmentation would be the ideal way to handle large medical datasets. Deep learning-based models have been the dominant approach, achieving remarkable performance on various medical segmentation tasks. There can be a significant variation in the size of the feature being segmented out of a medical image relative to the other features in the image, which can be challenging. In this paper, we propose a Densely Oriented Pooling Network (DOPNet) to capture variation in feature size in medical images and preserve spatial interconnection. DOPNet is based on two interdependent ideas: the dense connectivity and the pooling oriented layer. When tested on three publicly available medical image segmentation datasets, the proposed model achieves leading performance.