Robust and accurate MRI-based thigh muscle segmentation is critical for the study of longitudinal muscle volume change. However, the performance of traditional approaches is limited by morphological variance and often fails to exclude intramuscular fat. We propose a novel end-to-end semantic segmentation framework to automatically generate muscle masks that exclude intramuscular fat using longitudinal T1-weighted MRI scans. The architecture of the proposed U-shaped network follows the encoder-decoder network design with integrated residual blocks and attention gates to enhance performance. The proposed approach achieves a performance comparable with human imaging experts.
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