Abdominal CT urography kidney segmentation using spatiotemporal fully convolutional network

Kidney segmentation is fundamental for accurate diagnosis and treatment of kidney diseases. Computed tomography urography imaging is commonly used for radiologic diagnosis of patients with urologic disease. Recently, 2D and 3D fully convolutional networks are widely employed for medical image segmentation. However, most 2D fully convolutional networks do not take inter-slice spatial information into consideration, resulting in incomplete and inaccurate segmentation of targets in 3D volumes. While the spatial information is truly important for 3D volumes segmentation. To tackle these problems, we propose a computed tomography urography kidney segmentation method on the basis of spatiotemporal fully convolutional networks that employ the convolutional long short-term memory network to model inter-slice features of computed tomography urography images. We trained and tested our proposed method on kidney computed tomography urography data. The experimental results demonstrate our proposed method can effectively leverage the inter-slice spatial information to achieve better (or comparable) results than current 2D and 3D fully convolutional networks.