Papers › Unsupervised Body Part Regression via Spatially Self-ordering Convolutional Neural Networks

Unsupervised Body Part Regression via Spatially Self-ordering Convolutional Neural Networks

12 Jul 2017arXiv:1707.03891archive 2025-07-28

Ke Yan, Le Lu, Ronald M. Summers

Automatic body part recognition for CT slices can benefit various medical image applications. Recent deep learning methods demonstrate promising performance, with the requirement of large amounts of labeled images for training. The intrinsic structural or superior-inferior slice ordering information in CT volumes is not fully exploited. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based Unsupervised Body part Regression (UBR) algorithm to address this problem. A novel unsupervised learning method and two inter-sample CNN loss functions are presented. Distinct from previous work, UBR builds a coordinate system for the human body and outputs a continuous score for each axial slice, representing the normalized position of the body part in the slice. The training process of UBR resembles a self-organization process: slice scores are learned from inter-slice relationships. The training samples are unlabeled CT volumes that are abundant, thus no extra annotation effort is needed. UBR is simple, fast, and accurate. Quantitative and qualitative experiments validate its effectiveness. In addition, we show two applications of UBR in network initialization and anomaly detection.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Gabsha/ssbr mentioned on GitHub report
mic-dkfz/bodypartregression mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Anomaly Detectionregression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections