Enhancing Reproductive Organ Segmentation in Pediatric CT via Adversarial Learning

Accurately segmenting organs in abdominal computed tomography (CT) scans is crucial for clinical applications such as pre-operative planning and dose estimation. With the recent advent of deep learning algorithms, many robust frameworks have been proposed for organ segmentation in abdominal CT images. However, many of these frameworks require large amounts of training data in order to achieve high segmentation accuracy. Pediatric abdominal CT images containing reproductive organs are particularly hard to obtain since these organs are extremely sensitive to ionizing radiation. Hence, it is extremely challenging to train automatic segmentation algorithms on organs such as the uterus and the prostate. To address these issues, we propose a novel segmentation network with a built-in auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (ACGAN) that conditionally generates additional features during training. The proposed CFG-SegNet (conditional feature generation segmentation network) is trained on a single loss function which combines adversarial loss, reconstruction loss, auxiliary classifier loss and segmentation loss. 2.5D segmentation experiments are performed on a custom data set containing 24 female CT volumes containing the uterus and 40 male CT volumes containing the prostate. CFG-SegNet achieves an average segmentation accuracy of 0.929 DSC (Dice Similarity Coefficient) on the prostate and 0.724 DSC on the uterus with 4-fold cross validation. The results show that our network is high-performing and has the potential to precisely segment difficult organs with few available training images.