Structure Boundary Preserving Segmentation for Medical Image with Ambiguous Boundary

In this paper, we propose a novel image segmentation method to tackle two critical problems of medical image, which are (i) ambiguity of structure boundary in the medical image domain and (ii) uncertainty of the segmented region without specialized domain knowledge. To solve those two problems in automatic medical segmentation, we propose a novel structure boundary preserving segmentation framework. To this end, the boundary key point selection algorithm is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, the key points on the structural boundary of the target object are estimated. Then, a boundary preserving block (BPB) with the boundary key point map is applied for predicting the structure boundary of the target object. Further, for embedding experts knowledge in the fully automatic segmentation, we propose a novel shape boundary-aware evaluator (SBE) with the ground-truth structure information indicated by experts. The proposed SBE could give feedback to the segmentation network based on the structure boundary key point. The proposed method is general and flexible enough to be built on top of any deep learning-based segmentation network. We demonstrate that the proposed method could surpass the state-of-the-art segmentation network and improve the accuracy of three different segmentation network models on different types of medical image datasets.