2D vs. 3D U-Net abdominal organ segmentation in CT data using organ bounds
Daria Kern, Ulrich Klauck, Timo Ropinski, André Mastmeyer · 2021
We compare axial 2D U-Nets and their 3D counterparts for pixel/voxel-based segmentation of five abdominal organs in CT scans. For each organ, two competing CNNs are trained. They are evaluated by performing five-fold cross-validation on 80 3D images. In a two-step concept, the relevant area containing the organ is first extracted by detected bounding boxes and then passed as input to the organ-specific U-Net. Furthermore, a random regression forest approach for the automatic detection of bounding boxes is summarized from our previous work. The results show that the 2D U-Net is mostly on par with the 3D U-Net or even outperforms it. Especially for the kidneys, it is significantly better suited in this study.