Multi-dimensional Gated Recurrent Units for the Segmentation of Biomedical 3D-Data

We present a supervised deep learning method to automatically segment 3D volumes of biomedical image data. The presented method takes advantage of a neural network with the main layers consisting of multi-dimensional gated recurrent units. We apply an on-the-fly data augmentation technique which allows for accurate estimations without the need for either a huge amount of training data or advanced data pre- or postprocessing. We show that our method performs amongst the leading techniques on a popular brain segmentation challenge dataset in terms of speed, accuracy and memory efficiency. We describe in detail advantages over a similar method which uses the well-established long short-term memory.