Automatic Segmentation of Anatomical Areas in X-ray Images Based on Fully Convolutional Networks

Objective Medical image segmentation is a key step in medical image processing. An architecture of fully convolutional networks was proposed to realize automatic segmentation of anatomical areas in X-ray images. Methods Enlightened by the advantages of convolutional neural networks on features extraction, fully convolutional networks consisting of 9 layers were designed to segment medical images. The networks used convolution kernels of various sizes to extract multi-dimensional image features in the images, meanwhile, eliminated pooling layers to avoid the loss of image details during downsampling procedures. Results The experiment was conducted in accordance with the specific scene of X-ray images segmentation. Compared with traditional segmentation methods, this approach achieved more accurate segmentation of anatomical areas. Conclusion Fully convolutional networks can extract representative and multidimensional features of medical images, avoid the loss of image details during downsampling procedures, and complete automatic segmentation of anatomical areas accurately in X-ray images.