Liver Tissue Classification Using an Auto-context-based Deep Neural Network with a Multi-phase Training Framework

In this project, our goal is to classify different types of liver tissue on 3D multi-parameter magnetic resonance images in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. In these cases, 3D fully annotated segmentation masks from experts are expensive to acquire, thus the dataset available for training a predictive model is usually small. To achieve the goal, we designed a novel deep convolutional neural network that incorporates auto-context elements directly into a U-net-like architecture. We used a patch-based strategy with a weighted sampling procedure in order to train on a sufficient number of samples. Furthermore, we designed a multi-resolution and multi-phase training framework to reduce the learning space and to increase the regularization of the model. Our method was tested on images from 20 patients and yielded promising results, outperforming standard neural network approaches as well as a benchmark method for liver tissue classification.