  We propose an attention mechanism for 3D medical image segmentation. The
method, named segmentation-by-detection, is a cascade of a detection module
followed by a segmentation module. The detection module enables a region of
interest to come to attention and produces a set of object region candidates
which are further used as an attention model. Rather than dealing with the
entire volume, the segmentation module distills the information from the
potential region. This scheme is an efficient solution for volumetric data as
it reduces the influence of the surrounding noise which is especially important
for medical data with low signal-to-noise ratio. Experimental results on 3D
ultrasound data of the femoral head shows superiority of the proposed method
when compared with a standard fully convolutional network like the U-Net.
