A post-processing method to improve the white matter hyperintensity segmentation accuracy for randomly-initialized U-net

Abstract: White matter hyperintensity (WMH) is commonly found in elder individuals and appears to be associated with brain diseases. U-net is a convolutional network that has been widely used for biomedical image segmentation. Recently, U-net has been successfully applied to WMH segmentation. Random initialization is usally used to initialize the model weights in the U-net. However, the model may coverage to different local optima with different randomly initialized weights. We find a combination of thresholding and averaging the outputs of U-nets with different random initializations can largely improve the WMH segmentation accuracy. Based on this observation, we propose a post-processing technique concerning the way how averaging and thresholding are conducted. Specifically, we first transfer the score maps from three U-nets to binary masks via thresholding and then average those binary masks to obtain the final WMH segmentation. Both quantitative analysis (via the Dice similarity coefficient) and qualitative analysis (via visual examinations) reveal the superior performance of the proposed method. This post-processing technique is independent of the model used. As such, it can also be applied to situations where other deep learning models are employed, especially when random initialization is adopted and pre-training is unavailable.