AFSegNet: few-shot 3D ankle-foot bone segmentation via hierarchical feature distillation and multi-scale attention and fusion

Accurate segmentation of ankle and foot bones from CT scans is essential for morphological analysis. Ankle and foot bone segmentation challenges due to the blurred bone boundaries, narrow inter-bone gaps, gaps in the cortical shell, and uneven spongy bone textures. Our study endeavors to create a deep learning framework that harnesses advantages of 3D deep learning and tackles the hurdles in accurately segmenting ankle and foot bones from clinical CT scans. A few-shot framework AFSegNet is proposed considering the computational cost, which comprises three 3D deep-learning networks adhering to the principles of progressing from simple to complex tasks and network structures. Specifically, a shallow network first over-segments the foreground, and along with the foreground ground truth are used to supervise a subsequent network to detect the over-segmented regions, which are overwhelmingly inter-bone gaps. The foreground and inter-bone gap probability map are then input into a network with multi-scale attentions and feature fusion, a loss function combining region-, boundary-, and topology-based terms to get the fine-level bone segmentation. AFSegNet is applied to the 16-class segmentation task utilizing 123 in-house CT scans, which only requires a GPU with 24 GB memory since the three sub-networks can be successively and individually trained. AFSegNet achieves a Dice of 0.953 and average surface distance of 0.207. The ablation study and comparison with two basic state-of-the-art networks indicates the effectiveness of the progressively distilled features, attention and feature fusion modules, and hybrid loss functions, with the mean surface distance error decreased up to 50 %.