Organ Segmentation with Recursive Data Augmentation for Deep Models

The precise segmentation of organs from computed tomography is a fundamental and pivotal task for correct diagnosis and proper treatment of diseases. Neural network models are widely explored for their promising performance in the segmentation of medical images. However, the small dimension of available datasets is affecting the biomedical imaging domain significantly and has a huge impact in training of deep learning models. In this paper we try to address this issue by iteratively augmenting the dataset with auxiliary task-based information. This is obtained by introducing a recursive training approach, where a new set of segmented images is generated at each iteration and then concatenated with the original input data as organ attention maps. In the experimental evaluation two different datasets were tested and the results produced from the proposed approach have shown significant improvements in organ segmentation as compared to a standard non-recursive approach.