  Recently, dense connections have attracted substantial attention in computer
vision because they facilitate gradient flow and implicit deep supervision
during training. Particularly, DenseNet, which connects each layer to every
other layer in a feed-forward fashion, has shown impressive performances in
natural image classification tasks. We propose HyperDenseNet, a 3D fully
convolutional neural network that extends the definition of dense connectivity
to multi-modal segmentation problems. Each imaging modality has a path, and
dense connections occur not only between the pairs of layers within the same
path, but also between those across different paths. This contrasts with the
existing multi-modal CNN approaches, in which modeling several modalities
relies entirely on a single joint layer (or level of abstraction) for fusion,
typically either at the input or at the output of the network. Therefore, the
proposed network has total freedom to learn more complex combinations between
the modalities, within and in-between all the levels of abstraction, which
increases significantly the learning representation. We report extensive
evaluations over two different and highly competitive multi-modal brain tissue
segmentation challenges, iSEG 2017 and MRBrainS 2013, with the former focusing
on 6-month infant data and the latter on adult images. HyperDenseNet yielded
significant improvements over many state-of-the-art segmentation networks,
ranking at the top on both benchmarks. We further provide a comprehensive
experimental analysis of features re-use, which confirms the importance of
hyper-dense connections in multi-modal representation learning. Our code is
publicly available at https://www.github.com/josedolz/HyperDenseNet.
