Investigations of the Influences of a CNN's Receptive Field on Segmentation of Subnuclei of Bilateral Amygdalae

Abstract: Segmentation of objects with various sizes is relatively less explored in medical imaging, and has been very challenging in computer vision tasks in general. We hypothesize that the receptive field of a deep model corresponds closely to the size of object to be segmented, which could critically influence the segmentation accuracy of objects with varied sizes. In this study, we employed "AmygNet", a dual-branch fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) with two different sizes of receptive fields, to investigate the effects of receptive field on segmenting four major subnuclei of bilateral amygdalae. The experiment was conducted on 14 subjects, which are all 3-dimensional MRI human brain images. Since the scale of different subnuclear groups are different, by investigating the accuracy of each subnuclear group while using receptive fields of various sizes, we may find which kind of receptive field is suitable for object of which scale respectively. In the given condition, AmygNet with multiple receptive fields presents great potential in segmenting objects of different sizes.