  Ultrasound imaging is generally employed for real-time investigation of
internal anatomy of the human body for disease identification. Delineation of
the anatomical boundary of organs and pathological lesions is quite challenging
due to the stochastic nature of speckle intensity in the images, which also
introduces visual fatigue for the observer. This paper introduces a fully
convolutional neural network based method to segment organ and pathologies in
ultrasound volume by learning the spatial-relationship between closely related
classes in the presence of stochastically varying speckle intensity. We propose
a convolutional encoder-decoder like framework with (i) feature concatenation
across matched layers in encoder and decoder and (ii) index passing based
unpooling at the decoder for semantic segmentation of ultrasound volumes. We
have experimentally evaluated the performance on publicly available datasets
consisting of $10$ intravascular ultrasound pullback acquired at $20$ MHz and
$16$ freehand thyroid ultrasound volumes acquired $11 - 16$ MHz. We have
obtained a dice score of $0.93 \pm 0.08$ and $0.92 \pm 0.06$ respectively,
following a $10$-fold cross-validation experiment while processing frame of
$256 \times 384$ pixel in $0.035$s and a volume of $256 \times 384 \times 384$
voxel in $13.44$s.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition