Evaluating the impact of downsampling on 3D MRI images segmentation results based on similarity metrics

Abstract

Medical imaging plays a crucial role in diagnosing patient conditions, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) standing as a significant modality for numerous years. However, leveraging convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures like U-Net and its variations for anatomical segmentation demands considerable memory, particularly when working with full 3D image sets. Therefore, downsampling 3D MRIs proves advantageous in reducing memory consumption. Nevertheless, downsampling leads to a reduction in voxel count, potentially impacting the performance of commonly used segmentation metrics. The jaccard similarity index (JSI), dice similarity coefficient (DSC), and structural similarity index (SSIM) are extensively employed in image segmentation contexts. Hence, this study employs all three metrics to assess downsampled images and evaluate the robustness of the metrics when used to evaluate the downsampled 3D MRI images. The results show that JSI and DSC are more robust than SSIM when handling the downsampled data.