End-to-End Cascaded U-Nets with a Localization Network for Kidney Tumor Segmentation

Kidney tumor segmentation emerges as a new frontier of computer vision in medical imaging. This is partly due to its challenging manual annotation and great medical impact. Within the scope of the Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge 2019, that is aiming at combined kidney and tumor segmentation, this work proposes a novel combination of 3D U-Nets---collectively denoted TuNet---utilizing the resulting kidney masks for the consecutive tumor segmentation. The proposed method achieves a S{\o}rensen-Dice coefficient score of 0.902 for the kidney, and 0.408 for the tumor segmentation, computed from a five-fold cross-validation on the 210 patients available in the data.