Orchestral fully convolutional networks for small lesion segmentation in brain MRI
White matter (WM) lesion identification and segmentation has proved of clinical importance for diagnosis, treatment and neurological outcomes. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have demonstrated their success for large lesion load segmentation, but are not sensitive to small deep WM and sub-cortical lesion segmentation. We propose to use multi-scale and supervised fully convolutional networks (FCN) to segment small WM lesions in 22 anemic patients. The multiple scales enable us to identify the small lesions while reducing many false alarms, and the multi-supervised scheme allows a better management of the unbalanced data. Compared to a single FCN (Dice score ∼ 0.31), the performance on the testing dataset of our proposed networks achieved a Dice score of 0.78.