Fully automatic segmentation of the right ventricle via multi-task deep neural networks.

Segmentation of ventricles from cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images is a key step to obtaining clinical parameters useful for prognosis of cardiac pathologies. To improve upon the performance of existing fully convolutional network (FCN) based automatic right ventricle (RV) segmentation approaches, a multi-task deep neural network (DNN) architecture is proposed. The multi-task model can employ any FCN as a building block, allows for leveraging shared features between different tasks, and can be efficiently trained end-to-end. Specifically, a multi-task U-net is developed and implemented using the Tensorflow framework. Numerical tests on real datasets showcase the merits of the proposed approach and in particular its ability to offer improved segmentation performance for small-size RVs.