DP-UNet : A Densely-Connected Parallel-Dilated Fully Convolutional Network for Spine MRI Segmentation
Spine MRI is an effective clinical examination method for diseases like spinal canal stenosis, disc herniation and degenerative disc. Accurate and robust automated segmentation of vertebrae on spine MR images is an essential step in many clinical applications. However, automated segmentation of spine MR images is difficult, because the images are usually corrupted by unclear boundaries, articulation of vertebrae with each other, partial volume effects etc. The research proposed a novel end-to-end densely-connected parallel-dilated fully convolutional network (DP-UNet) for accurate segmentation of spine MR images.