US Patent 11488021 Systems and methods for image segmentation

Described herein are neural network-based systems, methods and instrumentalities associated with image segmentation that may be implementing using an encoder neural network and a decoder neural network. The encoder network may be configured to receive a medical image comprising a visual representation of an anatomical structure and generate a latent representation of the medical image indicating a plurality of features of the medical image. The latent representation may be used by the decoder network to generate a mask for segmenting the anatomical structure from the medical image. The decoder network may be pre-trained to learn a shape prior associated with the anatomical structure and once trained, the decoder network may be used to constrain an output of the encoder network during training of the encoder network.