Does manual delineation only provide the side information in CT prostate segmentation?

Prostate segmentation, for accurate prostate localization in CT images, is regarded as a crucial yet challenging task. Nevertheless, due to the inevitable factors (e.g., low contrast, large appearance and shape changes), the most important problem is how to learn the informative feature representation to distinguish the prostate from non-prostate regions. We address this challenging feature learning by leveraging the manual delineation as guidance: the manual delineation does not only indicate the category of patches, but also helps enhance the appearance of prostate. This is realized by the proposed cascaded deep domain adaptation (CDDA) model. Specifically, CDDA constructs several consecutive source domains by employing a mask of manual delineation to overlay on the original CT images with different mask ratios. Upon these source domains, convnet will guide better transferrable feature learning until to the target domain. Particularly, we implement two typical methods: patch-to-scalar (CDDA-CNN) and patch-to-patch (CDDA-FCN). Also, we theoretically analyze the generalization error bound of CDDA. Experimental results show the promising results of our method.