PSNet: Prostate segmentation on MRI based on a convolutional neural network

Automatic segmentation of the prostate on magnetic resonance images (MRI) has many applications in prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy. We proposed a deep fully convolutional neural network (CNN) to segment the prostate automatically. Our deep CNN model is trained end-to-end in a single learning stage, which uses prostate MRI and the corresponding ground truths as inputs. The learned CNN model can be used to make an inference for pixel-wise segmentation. Experiments were performed on three data sets, which contain prostate MRI of 140 patients. The proposed CNN model of prostate segmentation (PSNet) obtained a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 85.0 ± 3.8% as compared to the manually labeled ground truth. Experimental results show that the proposed model could yield satisfactory segmentation of the prostate on MRI.