To better understand early brain development in health and disorder, it is critical to accurately segment infant brain magnetic resonance (MR) images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance; h owever, one of the major limitations is that the learning-based methods may suffer from the multi-site issue, that is, the models trained on a dataset from one site may not be applicable to the datasets acquired from other sites with different imaging protocols/scanners. To promote methodological development in the community, the iSeg-2019 challenge (http://iseg2019.web.unc.edu) provides a set of 6-month infant subjects from multiple sites with different protocols/scanners for the participating methods. T raining/validation subjects are from UNC (MAP) and testing subjects are from UNC/UMN (BCP), Stanford University, and Emory University. By the time of writing, there are 30 automatic segmentation methods participated in the iSeg-2019. In this article, 8 top-ranked methods were reviewed by detailing their pipelines/implementations, presenting experimental results, and evaluating performance across different sites in terms of whole brain, regions of interest, and gyral landmark curves. We further pointed out their limitations and possible directions for addressing the multi-site issue. We find that multi-site consistency is still an open issue. We hope that the multi-site dataset in the iSeg-2019 and this review article will attract more researchers to address the challenging and critical multi-site issue in practice.

在婴幼儿脑组织分割领域中,婴幼儿脑组织存在对比度低、灰度不均匀等问题,这些问题导致现有方法的精度仍然达不到满意的结果.因此,本文提出了一种基于三维U-Net网络的脑部核磁共振图像组织分割方法,融合注意力机制模块和金字塔结构模块,可以更好地在不同的层次和位置提供模型信息,图像的上下文信息得到充分的应用以降低图像信息损失,同样还可以挖掘通道映射之间的相互依赖关系和特征映射,提高特定语义的特征表示.在Iseg2017数据集中所提出算法的WM(白质),GM(灰质)的DICE指标结果与此前最优结果相比提高了0.7％,0.7％,CSF(脑脊液)则具有可对比性.在Iseg2019跨数据集挑战的评估当中,WM,GM的分割结果在DICE,ASD两个指标均取得了第一名,CSF的指标获得第二名.

In this paper, we propose a dual aggregation network to adaptively aggregate different information in infant brain MRI segmentation. More precisely, we added two modules based on 3D-UNet to better model information at different levels and locations. The dilated convolution pyramid downsampling module is mainly to solve the problem of loss of spatial information on the downsampling process, and it can effectively save details while reducing the resolution. The self-attention module can integrate the remote dependence on the feature maps in two dimensions of spatial and channel, effectively improving the representation ability and discriminating ability of the model. Our results are compared to the winners of iseg2017's first evaluation, the DICE ratio of WM and GM increased by 0.7 iseg-2019 cross-dataset challenge,we achieve the first place in the DICE of WM and GM, and the DICE of CSF is second.