Medical image segmentation using boundary-enhanced guided packet rotation dual attention decoder network

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Hongchun Lu ◽  
Shengwei Tian ◽  
Long Yu ◽  
Yan Xing ◽  
Junlong Cheng ◽  
...  

OBJECTIVE: The automatic segmentation of medical images is an important task in clinical applications. However, due to the complexity of the background of the organs, the unclear boundary, and the variable size of different organs, some of the features are lost during network learning, and the segmentation accuracy is low. To address these issues, This prompted us to study whether it is possible to better preserve the deep feature information of the image and solve the problem of low segmentation caused by unclear image boundaries. METHODS: In this study, we (1) build a reliable deep learning network framework, named BGRANet,to improve the segmentation performance for medical images; (2) propose a packet rotation convolutional fusion encoder network to extract features; (3) build a boundary enhanced guided packet rotation dual attention decoder network, which is used to enhance the boundary of the segmentation map and effectively fuse more prior information; and (4) propose a multi-resolution fusion module to generate high-resolution feature maps. We demonstrate the effffectiveness of the proposed method on two publicly available datasets. RESULTS: BGRANet has been trained and tested on the prepared dataset and the experimental results show that our proposed model has better segmentation performance. For 4 class classifification (CHAOS dataset), the average dice similarity coeffiffifficient reached 91.73%. For 2 class classifification (Herlev dataset), the prediction, sensitivity, specifificity, accuracy, and Dice reached 93.75%, 94.30%, 98.19%, 97.43%, and 98.08% respectively. The experimental results show that BGRANet can improve the segmentation effffect for medical images. CONCLUSION: We propose a boundary-enhanced guided packet rotation dual attention decoder network. It achieved high segmentation accuracy with a reduced parameter number.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Zhuofu Deng ◽  
Binbin Wang ◽  
Zhiliang Zhu

Maxillary sinus segmentation plays an important role in the choice of therapeutic strategies for nasal disease and treatment monitoring. Difficulties in traditional approaches deal with extremely heterogeneous intensity caused by lesions, abnormal anatomy structures, and blurring boundaries of cavity. 2D and 3D deep convolutional neural networks have grown popular in medical image segmentation due to utilization of large labeled datasets to learn discriminative features. However, for 3D segmentation in medical images, 2D networks are not competent in extracting more significant spacial features, and 3D ones suffer from unbearable burden of computation, which results in great challenges to maxillary sinus segmentation. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network with an end-to-end manner to generalize a fully automatic 3D segmentation. At first, our proposed model serves a symmetrical encoder-decoder architecture for multitask of bounding box estimation and in-region 3D segmentation, which cannot reduce excessive computation requirements but eliminate false positives remarkably, promoting 3D segmentation applied in 3D convolutional neural networks. In addition, an overestimation strategy is presented to avoid overfitting phenomena in conventional multitask networks. Meanwhile, we introduce residual dense blocks to increase the depth of the proposed network and attention excitation mechanism to improve the performance of bounding box estimation, both of which bring little influence to computation cost. Especially, the structure of multilevel feature fusion in the pyramid network strengthens the ability of identification to global and local discriminative features in foreground and background achieving more advanced segmentation results. At last, to address problems of blurring boundary and class imbalance in medical images, a hybrid loss function is designed for multiple tasks. To illustrate the strength of our proposed model, we evaluated it against the state-of-the-art methods. Our model performed better significantly with an average Dice 0.947±0.031, VOE 10.23±5.29, and ASD 2.86±2.11, respectively, which denotes a promising technique with strong robust in practice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin Teng ◽  
Hang Li ◽  
Shahid Karim

Medical image segmentation is one of the hot issues in the related area of image processing. Precise segmentation for medical images is a vital guarantee for follow-up treatment. At present, however, low gray contrast and blurred tissue boundaries are common in medical images, and the segmentation accuracy of medical images cannot be effectively improved. Especially, deep learning methods need more training samples, which lead to time-consuming process. Therefore, we propose a novelty model for medical image segmentation based on deep multiscale convolutional neural network (CNN) in this article. First, we extract the region of interest from the raw medical images. Then, data augmentation is operated to acquire more training datasets. Our proposed method contains three models: encoder, U-net, and decoder. Encoder is mainly responsible for feature extraction of 2D image slice. The U-net cascades the features of each block of the encoder with those obtained by deconvolution in the decoder under different scales. The decoding is mainly responsible for the upsampling of the feature graph after feature extraction of each group. Simulation results show that the new method can boost the segmentation accuracy. And, it has strong robustness compared with other segmentation methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingquan Meng ◽  
Lianyu Wang ◽  
Tingting Wang ◽  
Meng Wang ◽  
Weifang Zhu ◽  
...  

Choroid neovascularization (CNV) is one of the blinding ophthalmologic diseases. It is mainly caused by new blood vessels growing in choroid and penetrating Bruch's membrane. Accurate segmentation of CNV is essential for ophthalmologists to analyze the condition of the patient and specify treatment plan. Although many deep learning-based methods have achieved promising results in many medical image segmentation tasks, CNV segmentation in retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is still very challenging as the blur boundary of CNV, large morphological differences, speckle noise, and other similar diseases interference. In addition, the lack of pixel-level annotation data is also one of the factors that affect the further improvement of CNV segmentation accuracy. To improve the accuracy of CNV segmentation, a novel multi-scale information fusion network (MF-Net) based on U-Shape architecture is proposed for CNV segmentation in retinal OCT images. A novel multi-scale adaptive-aware deformation module (MAD) is designed and inserted into the top of the encoder path, aiming at guiding the model to focus on multi-scale deformation of the targets, and aggregates the contextual information. Meanwhile, to improve the ability of the network to learn to supplement low-level local high-resolution semantic information to high-level feature maps, a novel semantics-details aggregation module (SDA) between encoder and decoder is proposed. In addition, to leverage unlabeled data to further improve the CNV segmentation, a semi-supervised version of MF-Net is designed based on pseudo-label data augmentation strategy, which can leverage unlabeled data to further improve CNV segmentation accuracy. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed MF-Net and SemiMF-Net. The experiment results show that both proposed MF-Net and SemiMF-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms.


2014 ◽  
Vol 513-517 ◽  
pp. 3750-3756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Zheng Ma ◽  
Jia Xin Chen

The traditional segmentation method for medical image segmentation is difficult to achieve the accuracy requirement, and when the edges of the image are blurred, it will occurs incomplete segmentation problem, in order to solve this problem, we propose a medical image segmentation method which based on Chan-Vese model and mathematical morphology. The method integrates Chan-Vese model, mathematical morphology, composite multiphase level sets segmentation algorithm, first, through iterative etching operation to extract the outline of the medical image, and then the medical image is segmented by the Chan-Vese model based on the complex multiphase level sets, finally the medical image image is dilated iteratively by using morphological dilation to restore the image. The experimental results and analysis show that, this method improves the multi-region segmentation accuracy during the segmentation of medical image and solves the problem of incomplete segmentation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-13
Author(s):  
Ayush Somani ◽  
Divij Singh ◽  
Dilip Prasad ◽  
Alexander Horsch

We often locate ourselves in a trade-off situation between what is predicted and understanding why the predictive modeling made such a prediction. This high-risk medical segmentation task is no different where we try to interpret how well has the model learned from the image features irrespective of its accuracy. We propose image-specific fine-tuning to make a deep learning model adaptive to specific medical imaging tasks. Experimental results reveal that: a) proposed model is more robust to segment previously unseen objects (negative test dataset) than state-of-the-art CNNs; b) image-specific fine-tuning with the proposed heuristics significantly enhances segmentation accuracy; and c) our model leads to accurate results with fewer user interactions and less user time than conventional interactive segmentation methods. The model successfully classified ’no polyp’ or ’no instruments’ in the image irrespective of the absence of negative data in training samples from Kvasir-seg and Kvasir-Instrument datasets.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Z. Faizal Khan ◽  
A. Kannan

Abstract The performance of assessment in medical image segmentation is highly correlated with the extraction of anatomic structures from them, and the major task is how to separate the regions of interests from the background and soft tissues successfully. This paper proposes a fuzzy logic based bitplane method to automatically segment the background of images and to locate the region of interest of medical images. This segmentation algorithm consists of three steps, namely identification, rule firing, and inference. In the first step, we begin by identifying the bitplanes that represent the lungs clearly. For this purpose, the intensity value of a pixel is separated into bitplanes. In the second step, the triple signum function assigns an optimum threshold based on the grayscale values for the anatomical structure present in the medical images. Fuzzy rules are formed based on the available bitplanes to form the membership table and are stored in a knowledge base. Finally, rules are fired to assign final segmentation values through the inference process. The proposed new metrics are used to measure the accuracy of the segmentation method. From the analysis, it is observed that the proposed metrics are more suitable for the estimation of segmentation accuracy. The results obtained from this work show that the proposed method performs segmentation effectively for the different classes of medical images.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0247388
Author(s):  
Jingfei Hu ◽  
Hua Wang ◽  
Jie Wang ◽  
Yunqi Wang ◽  
Fang He ◽  
...  

Semantic segmentation of medical images provides an important cornerstone for subsequent tasks of image analysis and understanding. With rapid advancements in deep learning methods, conventional U-Net segmentation networks have been applied in many fields. Based on exploratory experiments, features at multiple scales have been found to be of great importance for the segmentation of medical images. In this paper, we propose a scale-attention deep learning network (SA-Net), which extracts features of different scales in a residual module and uses an attention module to enforce the scale-attention capability. SA-Net can better learn the multi-scale features and achieve more accurate segmentation for different medical image. In addition, this work validates the proposed method across multiple datasets. The experiment results show SA-Net achieves excellent performances in the applications of vessel detection in retinal images, lung segmentation, artery/vein(A/V) classification in retinal images and blastocyst segmentation. To facilitate SA-Net utilization by the scientific community, the code implementation will be made publicly available.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaqi Huang ◽  
Ge Hu ◽  
Changjin Ji ◽  
Huahui Xiong

Abstract Medical image segmentation is crucial in diagnosing and treating diseases, but automatic segmentation of complex images is very challenging. Here we present a method, called the crack propagation method (CPM), based on the principles of fracture mechanics. This unique method converts the image segmentation problem into a mechanical one, extracting the boundary information of the target area by tracing the crack propagation on a thin plate with grooves corresponding to the area edge. The greatest advantage of CPM is in segmenting images involving blurred or even discontinuous boundaries, a task difficult to achieve by existing auto-segmentation methods. The segmentation results for synthesized images and real medical images show that CPM has high accuracy in segmenting complex boundaries. With increasing demand for medical imaging in clinical practice and research, this method will show its unique potential.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (9) ◽  
pp. 3525-3541
Author(s):  
Hiren Mewada ◽  
Amit V. Patel ◽  
Jitendra Chaudhari ◽  
Keyur Mahant ◽  
Alpesh Vala

Purpose In clinical analysis, medical image segmentation is an important step to study the anatomical structure. This helps to diagnose and classify abnormality in the image. The wide variations in the image modality and limitations in the acquisition process of instruments make this segmentation challenging. This paper aims to propose a semi-automatic model to tackle these challenges and to segment medical images. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose Legendre polynomial-based active contour to segment region of interest (ROI) from the noisy, low-resolution and inhomogeneous medical images using the soft computing and multi-resolution framework. In the first phase, initial segmentation (i.e. prior clustering) is obtained from low-resolution medical images using fuzzy C-mean (FCM) clustering and noise is suppressed using wavelet energy-based multi-resolution approach. In the second phase, resultant segmentation is obtained using the Legendre polynomial-based level set approach. Findings The proposed model is tested on different medical images such as x-ray images for brain tumor identification, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), spine images, blood cells and blood vessels. The rigorous analysis of the model is carried out by calculating the improvement against noise, required processing time and accuracy of the segmentation. The comparative analysis concludes that the proposed model withstands the noise and succeeds to segment any type of medical modality achieving an average accuracy of 99.57%. Originality/value The proposed design is an improvement to the Legendre level set (L2S) model. The integration of FCM and wavelet transform in L2S makes model insensitive to noise and intensity inhomogeneity and hence it succeeds to segment ROI from a wide variety of medical images even for the images where L2S failed to segment them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Hengxin Liu ◽  
Qiang Li ◽  
I-Chi Wang

The segmentation of brain tumors in medical images is a crucial step of clinical treatment. Manual segmentation is time consuming and labor intensive, and existing automatic segmentation methods suffer from issues such as numerous parameters and low precision. To resolve these issues, this study proposes a learnable group convolution-based segmentation method that replaces convolution in the feature extraction stage with learnable group convolution, thereby reducing the number of convolutional network parameters and enhancing communication between convolution groups. To improve utilization of the feature maps, we added a skip connection structure between learnable group convolution modules, which increased segmentation precision. We used deep supervision to combine output images in the network output stage to reduce overfitting and enhance the recognition capabilities of the network. We tested the proposed algorithm model using the open BraTS 2018 dataset. The experiment results revealed that the proposed model is superior to 3D U-Net and DMFNet and has better segmentation results for tumor cores than No New-Net and NVDLMED, the winning methods in the BraTS 2018 challenge. The segmentation precision of the proposed method with regard to whole tumors, enhancing tumors, and tumor cores was 90.25%, 80.36%, and 86.20%. Furthermore, the proposed method uses fewer parameters and a less complex model.


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