  Automatic segmentation of liver lesions is a fundamental requirement towards
the creation of computer aided diagnosis (CAD) and decision support systems
(CDS). Traditional segmentation approaches depend heavily upon hand-crafted
features and a priori knowledge of the user. As such, these methods are
difficult to adopt within a clinical environment. Recently, deep learning
methods based on fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been successful in
many segmentation problems primarily because they leverage a large labelled
dataset to hierarchically learn the features that best correspond to the
shallow visual appearance as well as the deep semantics of the areas to be
segmented. However, FCNs based on a 16 layer VGGNet architecture have limited
capacity to add additional layers. Therefore, it is challenging to learn more
discriminative features among different classes for FCNs. In this study, we
overcome these limitations using deep residual networks (ResNet) to segment
liver lesions. ResNet contain skip connections between convolutional layers,
which solved the problem of the training degradation of training accuracy in
very deep networks and thereby enables the use of additional layers for
learning more discriminative features. In addition, we achieve more precise
boundary definitions through a novel cascaded ResNet architecture with
multi-scale fusion to gradually learn and infer the boundaries of both the
liver and the liver lesions. Our proposed method achieved 4th place in the ISBI
2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge by the submission deadline.
