Multi-Structure Deep Segmentation with Shape Priors and Latent Adversarial Regularization

Automatic segmentation of the musculoskeletal system in pediatric magnetic resonance (MR) images is a challenging but crucial task for morphological evaluation in clinical practice. We propose a deep learning-based regularized segmentation method for multi-structure bone delineation in MR images, designed to overcome the inherent scarcity and heterogeneity of pediatric data. Based on a newly devised shape code discriminator, our adversarial regularization scheme enforces the deep network to follow a learnt shape representation of the anatomy. The novel shape priors based adversarial regularization (SPAR) exploits latent shape codes arising from ground truth and predicted masks to guide the segmentation network towards more consistent and plausible predictions. Our contribution is compared to state-of-the-art regularization methods on two pediatric musculoskeletal imaging datasets from ankle and shoulder joints.