A modified FCN-based method for Left Ventricle endocardium and epicardium segmentation with new block modules

Abstract

Cardiac segmentation of medical magnetic resonance images has been crucial nowadays owing to its necessity for cardiac problems diagnosis. In the increasing demand of advanced procedures for cardiac disease diagnosis and inspired by the structure of receptive field block; in this paper, we propose a new block module then further assembling into a deep fully convolutional neural network to deal with automated left ventricle segmentation. With only one learning stage, our proposed model is trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels and validated on two popular cardiac MRI benchmarks, ACDC and SunnyBrook datasets. Several experiments have proved that our new model architecture has a better performance than previous segmentation methods with enhanced feature discriminability and robustness, despite having much less training parameters.