Kidney and Kidney-tumor Segmentation Using Cascaded V-Nets

Kidney cancer is the seventh most common cancer worldwide, accounting for an estimated 140,000 global deaths annually. Kidney segmentation in volumetric medical images plays an important role in clinical diagnosis, radiotherapy planning, interventional guidance and patient follow-ups however, to our knowledge, there is no automatic kidneytumor segmentation method present in the literature. In this paper, we address the challenge of simultaneous semantic segmentation of kidney and tumor by adopting a cascaded V-Net framework. The first V-Net in our pipeline produces a region of interest around the probable location of the kidney and tumor, which facilitates the removal of the unwanted region in the CT volume. The second sets of V-Nets are trained separately for the kidney and tumor, which produces the kidney and tumor masks respectively. The final segmentation is achieved by combining the kidney and tumor mask together. Our method is trained and validated on 190 and 20 patients scans, respectively, accesses from 2019 Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge database. We achieved a validation accuracy in terms of the Sørensen Dice coefficient of about 97%