Label cleaning and propagation for improved segmentation performance using fully convolutional networks.

In recent years, fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been applied to various medical image segmentation tasks. However, it is difficult to generate a large amount of high-quality annotation data to train FCNs for medical image segmentation. Thus, it is desired to achieve high segmentation performances even from incomplete training data. We aim to evaluate performance of FCNs to clean noises and interpolate labels from noisy and sparsely given label images. To evaluate the label cleaning and propagation performance of FCNs, we used 2D and 3D FCNs to perform volumetric brain segmentation from magnetic resonance image volumes, based on network training on incomplete training datasets from noisy and sparse annotation. The experimental results using pseudo-incomplete training data showed that both 2D and 3D FCNs could provide improved segmentation results from the incomplete training data, especially by using three orthogonal annotation images for network training. This paper presented a validation for label cleaning and propagation based on FCNs. FCNs might have the potential to achieve improved segmentation performances even from sparse annotation data including possible noises by manual annotation, which can be an important clue to more efficient annotation.