Multi-scale structured CNN with label consistency for brain MR image segmentation

In this paper, a novel method for brain MR image segmentation has been proposed, with deep learning techniques to obtain preliminary labelling and graphical models to produce the final result. A specific architecture, namely multi-scale structured convolutional neural networks (MS-CNN), is designed to capture discriminative features for each sub-cortical structure and to generate a label probability map for the target image. Due to complex background in brain images and the lack of spatial constraints among testing samples, the initial result obtained with MS-CNN is not smooth. To deal with this problem, dynamic random walker with decayed region of interest is then proposed to enforce label consistency. Comprehensive evaluations have been carried out on two publicly available data-sets and experimental results indicate that the proposed method can obtain better segmentation quality efficiently.