A Multitask Deep Learning Approach for Staples and Wound Segmentation in Abdominal Post-surgical Images.

Deep learning techniques provide a powerful and versatile tool in different areas, such as object segmentation in medical images. In this paper, we propose a network based on the U-Net architecture to perform the segmentation of wounds and staples in abdominal surgery images. Moreover, since both tasks are highly interdependent, we propose a multitask architecture that allows to simultaneously obtain, in the same network evaluation, the masks with the staples and wound location of the image. When performing this multitasking, it is necessary to formulate a global loss function that linearly combines the losses of both partial tasks. This is why the study also involves the GradNorm algorithm to determine which weight is associated to each loss function during each training step. The main conclusion of the study is that multitask segmentation offers superior performance compared to segmenting by separate tasks.