Method and system for automatically detecting anatomical structures in a medical image

Abstract

The invention relates to a computer-implemented method for automatically detecting anatomical structures () in a medical image () of a subject, the method comprising applying an object detector function () to the medical image, wherein the object detector function performs the steps of: (A) applying a first neural network () to the medical image, wherein the first neural network is trained to detect a first plurality of classes of larger-sized anatomical structures (), thereby generating as output the coordinates of at least one first bounding box () and the confidence score of it containing a larger-sized anatomical structure; (B) cropping () the medical image to the first bounding box, thereby generating a cropped image () containing the image content within the first bounding box (); and (C) applying a second neural network () to the cropped medical image, wherein the second neural network is trained to detect at least one second class of smaller-sized anatomical structures (), thereby generating as output the coordinates of at least one second bounding box () and the confidence score of it containing a smaller-sized anatomical structure.