Bayesian VoxDRN: A Probabilistic Deep Voxelwise Dilated Residual Network for Whole Heart Segmentation from 3D MR Images

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep voxelwise dilated residual network, referred as Bayesian VoxDRN, to segment the whole heart from 3D MR images. Bayesian VoxDRN can predict voxelwise class labels with a measure of model uncertainty, which is achieved by a dropout-based Monte Carlo sampling during testing to generate a posterior distribution of the voxel class labels. Our method has three compelling advantages. First, the dropout mechanism encourages the model to learn a distribution of weights with better data-explanation ability and prevents over-fitting. Second, focal loss and Dice loss are well encapsulated into a complementary learning objective to segment both hard and easy classes. Third, an iterative switch training strategy is introduced to alternatively optimize a binary segmentation task and a multi-class segmentation task for a further accuracy improvement. Experiments on the MICCAI 2017 multi-modality whole heart segmentation challenge data corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method.