# Development of a Multi-Task Learning V-Net for Pulmonary Lobar Segmentation on Computed Tomography and Application to Diseased Lungs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05204 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05204/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08987/) (2017)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [MosMedData: Chest CT Scans With COVID-19 Related Findings Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06465/) (2020)
- [Automatic Pulmonary Lobe Segmentation Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09879/) (2019)
- [CT-based COVID-19 Triage: Deep Multitask Learning Improves Joint Identification and Severity Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01441/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated lobar segmentation allows regional evaluation of lung disease and is important for diagnosis and therapy planning. Advanced statistical workflows permitting such evaluation is a needed area within respiratory medicine; their adoption remains slow, with poor workflow accuracy. Diseased lung regions often produce high-density zones on CT images, limiting an algorithm's execution to specify damaged lobes due to oblique or lacking fissures. This impact motivated developing an improved machine learning method to segment lung lobes that utilises tracheobronchial tree information to enhance segmentation accuracy through the algorithm's spatial familiarity to define lobar extent more accurately. The method undertakes parallel segmentation of lobes and auxiliary tissues simultaneously by employing multi-task learning (MTL) in conjunction with V-Net-attention, a popular convolutional neural network in the imaging realm. In keeping with the model's adeptness for better generalisation, high performance was retained in an external dataset of patients with four distinct diseases: severe lung cancer, COVID-19 pneumonitis, collapsed lungs and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), even though the training data included none of these cases. The benefit of our external validation test is specifically relevant since our choice includes those patients who have diagnosed lung disease with associated radiological abnormalities. To ensure equal rank is given to all segmentations in the main task we report the following performance (Dice score) on a per-segment basis: normal lungs 0.97, COPD 0.94, lung cancer 0.94, COVID-19 pneumonitis 0.94 and collapsed lung 0.92, all at p<0.05. Even segmenting lobes with large deformations on CT images, the model maintained high accuracy. The approach can be readily adopted in the clinical setting as a robust tool for radiologists.