YOLOv8-Seg for Multi-Tissue Segmentation of Fetal Brain MRI: A FeTA Benchmark and Comparative Study with U-Net Variants
摘要
Accurate segmentation of fetal brain tissues from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is essential for quantitative assessment of neurodevelopment during gestation. The Fetal Tissue Annotation Challenge (FeTA) has established multi-class segmentation of seven brain tissues as a benchmark task. State-of-the-art approaches, such as U-Net and its variants, achieve high accuracy but typically require volumetric reconstruction, extensive preprocessing, and considerable computational resources, limiting their applicability for real-time or embedded scenarios. In contrast, You Only Look Once YOLOv8-Seg is a recent, lightweight instance segmentation model that offers high inference speed and minimal preprocessing requirements. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has systematically evaluated YOLOv8-Seg for multi-tissue segmentation of fetal brain MRI. In this work, we present the first adaptation and benchmark of YOLOv8-Seg on the FeTA dataset, comparing its performance against two-Dimensional (2D) and three-Dimensional (3D) Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation (U-Net) baselines. Our evaluation covers both segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency. We further investigate the impact of task complexity by highlighting class-specific challenges of multi-tissue segmentation performance, such as tissue boundary ambiguities. Results show that YOLOv8-Seg, though designed for natural image analysis, achieves competitive accuracy primarily on large tissue structures, while exhibiting performance trade-offs on smaller or less well-defined tissues, and significantly outperforming U-Net-based methods in inference speed. Specifically, YOLOv8-Seg attains a mean Dice score of 0.7479 and an average HD95 of 2.3 mm across seven tissue classes on the FeTA benchmark, while enabling near real-time inference at 0.12 s per volume with only 2.8 GB of Graphical Processing Unit memory usage.