Fully Automated Hippocampus Segmentation Pipeline using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Segmentation of the hippocampus on T1-weighted structural MR images is required to quantify the neurodegenerative effects in Alzheimer’s disease studies. In this work, we propose an automated artificial intelligence-based pipeline for hippocampus segmentation combined with manual ground truth (GT) data that originates from high-resolution T2-weighted MR images. Results are evaluated against the manual GT-labels and compared to the segmentation results from FreeSurfer v732. Our deep learning-based segmentation outperforms FreeSurfer in terms of accuracy and speed, while reference experiments using the T2-based GT-labels yield the best results. Thus, using T2-weighted images for ground truth generation can improve automated HC segmentation.