The need for fast acquisition and automatic analysis of MRI data is growing in the age of big data. Although compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) has been studied to accelerate MRI by reducing k-space measurements, in current CS-MRI techniques MRI applications such as segmentation are overlooked when doing image reconstruction. In this paper, we test the utility of CS-MRI methods in automatic segmentation models and propose a unified deep neural network architecture called SegNetMRI which we apply to the combined CS-MRI reconstruction and segmentation problem. SegNetMRI is built upon a MRI reconstruction network with multiple cascaded blocks each containing an encoder-decoder unit and a data fidelity unit, and MRI segmentation networks having the same encoder-decoder structure. The two subnetworks are pre-trained and fine-tuned with shared reconstruction encoders. The outputs are merged into the final segmentation. Our experiments show that SegNetMRI can improve both the reconstruction and segmentation performance when using compressive measurements.
@article{arxiv.1805.02165,
title = {Joint CS-MRI Reconstruction and Segmentation with a Unified Deep Network},
author = {Liyan Sun and Zhiwen Fan and Yue Huang and Xinghao Ding and John Paisley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.02165},
year = {2018}
}