A Joint Deep Learning Approach for Automated Liver and Tumor Segmentation

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of primary liver cancer in adults, and the most common cause of death of people suffering from cirrhosis. The segmentation of liver lesions in CT images allows assessment of tumor load, treatment planning, prognosis and monitoring of treatment response. Manual segmentation is a very time-consuming task and in many cases, prone to inaccuracies and automatic tools for tumor detection and segmentation are desirable. In this paper, we use a network architecture that consists of two consecutive fully convolutional neural networks. The first network segments the liver whereas the second network segments the actual tumor inside the liver. Our network is trained on a subset of the LiTS (Liver Tumor Segmentation) challenge and evaluated on data provided from the radiological center in Innsbruck.