Dual encoding DDS‐UNet liver tumour segmentation based on multi‐scale deep and shallow feature fusion

Abstract

AbstractThe fusion and utilization of multi‐scale deep and shallow features are of great significance in liver tumour segmentation. This study proposes a dual encoding DDS‐UNet liver tumour segmentation method based on multi‐scale deep and shallow feature fusion, aiming to fully achieve the fusion and utilization of deep and shallow features and achieve accurate segmentation. The proposed method mainly consists of residual convolution module fusion residual convolution (FRC), dual encoding end fusion module dual encoding end fusion (DEF), and skip connection fusion module jump connection fusion module (JCF). In the residual convolution module, a layer by layer fused residual convolution is used instead of traditional convolution to achieve better training. In the dual encoding end fusion module, multi‐scale feature fusion at the end provides more comprehensive contextual information, solves the loss of spatial geometric information. The skip connection fusion module reduces the interference of invalid features by changing the weights of spatial attention and channel attention on important features. The Dice coefficient, average intersection to union ratio, accuracy, recall, and accuracy indicators tested on the LiTS dataset were 90.37%, 90.16%, 93.78%, 94.91%, and 98.84%, respectively, which are superior to many advanced liver tumor segmentation methods.