Deep learning to segment pelvic bones: large-scale CT datasets and baseline models

Pelvic bone segmentation in CT has always been an essential step in clinical diagnosis and surgery planning of pelvic bone diseases. Existing methods for pelvic bone segmentation are either hand-crafted or semi-automatic and achieve limited accuracy when dealing with image appearance variations due to the multi-site domain shift, the presence of contrasted vessels, coprolith and chyme, bone fractures, low dose, metal artifacts, etc. Due to the lack of a large-scale pelvic CT dataset with annotations, deep learning methods are not fully explored. In this paper, we aim to bridge the data gap by curating a large pelvic CT dataset pooled from multiple sources, including 1184 CT volumes with a variety of appearance variations. Then, we propose for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, to learn a deep multi-class network for segmenting lumbar spine, sacrum, left hip, and right hip, from multiple-domain images simultaneously to obtain more effective and robust feature representations. Finally, we introduce a post-processor based on the signed distance function (SDF). Extensive experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our automatic method, achieving an average Dice of 0.987 for a metal-free volume. SDF post-processor yields a decrease of 15.1% in Hausdorff distance compared with traditional post-processor. We believe this large-scale dataset will promote the development of the whole community and open source the images, annotations, codes, and trained baseline models at https://github.com/ICT-MIRACLE-lab/CTPelvic1K .