  Automatic organ segmentation is an important yet challenging problem for
medical image analysis. The pancreas is an abdominal organ with very high
anatomical variability. This inhibits previous segmentation methods from
achieving high accuracies, especially compared to other organs such as the
liver, heart or kidneys. In this paper, we present a probabilistic bottom-up
approach for pancreas segmentation in abdominal computed tomography (CT) scans,
using multi-level deep convolutional networks (ConvNets). We propose and
evaluate several variations of deep ConvNets in the context of hierarchical,
coarse-to-fine classification on image patches and regions, i.e. superpixels.
We first present a dense labeling of local image patches via
$P{-}\mathrm{ConvNet}$ and nearest neighbor fusion. Then we describe a regional
ConvNet ($R_1{-}\mathrm{ConvNet}$) that samples a set of bounding boxes around
each image superpixel at different scales of contexts in a "zoom-out" fashion.
Our ConvNets learn to assign class probabilities for each superpixel region of
being pancreas. Last, we study a stacked $R_2{-}\mathrm{ConvNet}$ leveraging
the joint space of CT intensities and the $P{-}\mathrm{ConvNet}$ dense
probability maps. Both 3D Gaussian smoothing and 2D conditional random fields
are exploited as structured predictions for post-processing. We evaluate on CT
images of 82 patients in 4-fold cross-validation. We achieve a Dice Similarity
Coefficient of 83.6$\pm$6.3% in training and 71.8$\pm$10.7% in testing.
