Effective Image Segmentation Research Articles

AN INTELLIGENT MODEL FOR BENIGN AND MALIGNANT PULMONARY NODULE ANALYSIS USING U-NET NETWORKS AND MULTILEVEL ATTENTION MECHANISMS

A key study area throughout the medical sector for image processing and analysis is medical image segmentation. The diagnosis and treatment strategies of doctors may have a solid foundation owing to accurate and effective medical image segmentation. Conventional approaches in this field rely on manual feature extraction, which makes segmentation complex, costs doctors’ time and energy, and involves a subjective evaluation that is readily susceptible to diagnostic errors. Researchers have applied convolutional neural network-based deep learning techniques to the segmentation of medical images as a result of their impressive advancements and successes in the field of computer vision. The research described here uses the U-Net network’s outstanding feature learning capabilities and end-to-end processing mode for lung CT image segmentation via fully convolutional network (FCN) research. However, focusing on valuable, crucial information aspects in the U-Net network is challenging. This study employed multilevel attention mechanisms on the basis of U-Net networks to enhance the model’s accuracy in lung CT image segmentation. These mechanisms were inspired by attention mechanisms. By improving the segmentation accuracy and optimizing the segmentation effect, the new model embeds a self-attention module in front of each upsampling layer in the U-Net model. This module provides more detailed information by stitching the self-attention module of the original image and then suppresses irrelevant and redundant information by using the effect of feature extraction of the upsampling layer. Several additional comparative experiments were conducted on the 2019nCoVR dataset. The outcomes demonstrate the efficacy of the optimized model described in this paper and its application results in improved segmentation effects in lung CT images. Additionally, the new model has distinct advantages over existing approaches that are typical of medical image segmentation, which represent its higher level of lung CT image segmentation.

A novel CT image segmentation model

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used for clinical medical image segmentation to improve detection efficiency and accuracy. However, because of the fixed size of convolution kernel and receptive field for existing CNN model, some associated pixel features are ignored and segmentation performance is impaired. Therefore, we propose an effective image segmentation model, COPANet, which uses RepVGG as the backbone and replaces the standard convolution with dilated convolution of multiple kernels to increase the receptive field size, so that COPANet can make full use of pixel correlations and acquire contexture semantic information. We also build skip-connections between global and local features, where a parallel attention (PANet) is employed to extract important location information in the downsampling. PANet is a fused mechanism integrating channel attention with spatial attention in parallel, which can fully extract more global information. We also apply weighted combined loss to reduce the effect of class imbalance of foreground and background pixels on segmentation performance and speed up convergence. In addition, we conduct experiments on 480 cases of clinical CT sinus from Shanghai Tongji Hospital and 236 cases of CT patella fracture from Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital. The evaluation indexes after 5-Fold cross-validation are as follows: Precision is 92.76% and 96.55%, Recall is 88.25% and 57.58%, Specificity is 99.85% and 96.55%, IOU is 91.08% and 77.38%, Hausdorff Distance is 2.8135 and 11.1879, respectively. Compared with the state-of-the-art models, COPANet has higher segmentation accuracy and better generalization performance, which can assist the clinical diagnosis.

BiU-net: A dual-branch structure based on two-stage fusion strategy for biomedical image segmentation

Background and objectiveComputer-based biomedical image segmentation plays a crucial role in planning of assisted diagnostics and therapy. However, due to the variable size and irregular shape of the segmentation target, it is still a challenge to construct an effective medical image segmentation structure. Recently, hybrid architectures based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers were proposed. However, most current backbones directly replace one or all convolutional layers with transformer blocks, regardless of the semantic gap between features. Thus, how to sufficiently and effectively eliminate the semantic gap as well as combine the global and local information is a critical challenge. MethodsTo address the challenge, we propose a novel structure, called BiU-Net, which integrates CNNs and transformers with a two-stage fusion strategy. In the first fusion stage, called Single-Scale Fusion (SSF) stage, the encoding layers of the CNNs and transformers are coupled, with both having the same feature map size. The SSF stage aims to reconstruct local features based on CNNs and long-range information based on transformers in each encoding block. In the second stage, Multi-Scale Fusion (MSF), BiU-Net interacts with multi-scale features from various encoding layers to eliminate the semantic gap between deep and shallow layers. Furthermore, a Context-Aware Block (CAB) is embedded in the bottleneck to reinforce multi-scale features in the decoder. ResultsExperiments on four public datasets were conducted. On the BUSI dataset, our BiU-Net achieved 85.50 % on Dice coefficient (Dice), 76.73 % on intersection over union (IoU), and 97.23 % on accuracy (ACC). Compared to the state-of-the-art method, BiU-Net improves Dice by 1.17 %. For the Monuseg dataset, the proposed method attained the highest scores, reaching 80.27 % and 67.22 % for Dice and IoU. The BiU-Net achieves 95.33 % and 81.22 % Dice on the PH2 and DRIVE datasets. ConclusionsThe results of our experiments showed that BiU-Net transcends existing state-of-the-art methods on four publicly available biomedical datasets. Due to the powerful multi-scale feature extraction ability, our proposed BiU-Net is a versatile medical image segmentation framework for various types of medical images. The source code is released on (https://github.com/ZYLandy/BiU-Net).

Effective Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Probabilistic Representations and Prototype Learning.

Label scarcity, class imbalance and data uncertainty are three primary challenges that are commonly encountered in the semi-supervised medical image segmentation. In this work, we focus on the data uncertainty issue that is overlooked by previous literature. To address this issue, we propose a probabilistic prototype-based classifier that introduces uncertainty estimation into the entire pixel classification process, including probabilistic representation formulation, probabilistic pixel-prototype proximity matching, and distribution prototype update, leveraging principles from probability theory. By explicitly modeling data uncertainty at the pixel level, model robustness of our proposed framework to tricky pixels, such as ambiguous boundaries and noises, is greatly enhanced when compared to its deterministic counterpart and other uncertainty-aware strategy. Empirical evaluations on three publicly available datasets that exhibit severe boundary ambiguity show the superiority of our method over several competitors. Moreover, our method also demonstrates a stronger model robustness to simulated noisy data. Code is available at https://github.com/IsYuchenYuan/PPC.

Multi-ConDoS: Multimodal Contrastive Domain Sharing Generative Adversarial Networks for Self-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation.

Existing self-supervised medical image segmentation usually encounters the domain shift problem (i.e., the input distribution of pre-training is different from that of fine-tuning) and/or the multimodality problem (i.e., it is based on single-modal data only and cannot utilize the fruitful multimodal information of medical images). To solve these problems, in this work, we propose multimodal contrastive domain sharing (Multi-ConDoS) generative adversarial networks to achieve effective multimodal contrastive self-supervised medical image segmentation. Compared to the existing self-supervised approaches, Multi-ConDoS has the following three advantages: (i) it utilizes multimodal medical images to learn more comprehensive object features via multimodal contrastive learning; (ii) domain translation is achieved by integrating the cyclic learning strategy of CycleGAN and the cross-domain translation loss of Pix2Pix; (iii) novel domain sharing layers are introduced to learn not only domain-specific but also domain-sharing information from the multimodal medical images. Extensive experiments on two publicly multimodal medical image segmentation datasets show that, with only 5% (resp., 10%) of labeled data, Multi-ConDoS not only greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised and semi-supervised medical image segmentation baselines with the same ratio of labeled data, but also achieves similar (sometimes even better) performances as fully supervised segmentation methods with 50% (resp., 100%) of labeled data, which thus proves that our work can achieve superior segmentation performances with very low labeling workload. Furthermore, ablation studies prove that the above three improvements are all effective and essential for Multi-ConDoS to achieve this very superior performance.

An efficient hybrid differential evolution-golden jackal optimization algorithm for multilevel thresholding image segmentation.

Image segmentation is a crucial process in the field of image processing. Multilevel threshold segmentation is an effective image segmentation method, where an image is segmented into different regions based on multilevel thresholds for information analysis. However, the complexity of multilevel thresholding increases dramatically as the number of thresholds increases. To address this challenge, this article proposes a novel hybrid algorithm, termed differential evolution-golden jackal optimizer (DEGJO), for multilevel thresholding image segmentation using the minimum cross-entropy (MCE) as a fitness function. The DE algorithm is combined with the GJO algorithm for iterative updating of position, which enhances the search capacity of the GJO algorithm. The performance of the DEGJO algorithm is assessed on the CEC2021 benchmark function and compared with state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. Additionally, the efficacy of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by performing multilevel segmentation experiments on benchmark images. The experimental results demonstrate that the DEGJO algorithm achieves superior performance in terms of fitness values compared to other metaheuristic algorithms. Moreover, it also yields good results in quantitative performance metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and feature similarity index (FSIM) measurements.

Design of image segmentation model based on residual connection and feature fusion.

With the development of deep learning technology, convolutional neural networks have made great progress in the field of image segmentation. However, for complex scenes and multi-scale target images, the existing technologies are still unable to achieve effective image segmentation. In view of this, an image segmentation model based on residual connection and feature fusion is proposed. The model makes comprehensive use of the deep feature extraction ability of residual connections and the multi-scale feature integration ability of feature fusion. In order to solve the problem of background complexity and information loss in traditional image segmentation, experiments were carried out on two publicly available data sets. The results showed that in the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset and the Caltech UCSD Birds200 dataset, when the model completed the 56th and 84th iterations, respectively, the average accuracy of FRes-MFDNN was the highest, which was 97.89% and 98.24%, respectively. In the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset and the Caltech UCSD Birds200 dataset, when the system model ran to 0.20s and 0.26s, the F1 value of the FRes-MFDNN method was the largest, and the F1 value approached 100% infinitely. The FRes-MFDNN segmented four images in the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset, and the segmentation accuracy of images 1, 2, 3 and 4 were 91.44%, 92.12%, 94.02% and 91.41%, respectively. In practical applications, the MSRF-Net method, LBN-AA-SPN method, ARG-Otsu method, and FRes-MFDNN were used to segment unlabeled bird images. The results showed that the FRes-MFDNN was more complete in details, and the overall effect was significantly better than the other three models. Meanwhile, in ordinary scene images, although there was a certain degree of noise and occlusion, the model still accurately recognized and segmented the main bird images. The results show that compared with the traditional model, after FRes-MFDNN segmentation, the completeness, detail, and spatial continuity of pixels have been significantly improved, making it more suitable for complex scenes.

AISOA-SSformer: An Effective Image Segmentation Method for Rice Leaf Disease Based on the Transformer Architecture.

Rice leaf diseases have an important impact on modern farming, threatening crop health and yield. Accurate semantic segmentation techniques are crucial for segmenting diseased leaf parts and assisting farmers in disease identification. However, the diversity of rice growing environments and the complexity of leaf diseases pose challenges. To address these issues, this study introduces an innovative semantic segmentation algorithm for rice leaf pests and diseases based on the Transformer architecture AISOA-SSformer. First, it features the sparse global-update perceptron for real-time parameter updating, enhancing model stability and accuracy in learning irregular leaf features. Second, the salient feature attention mechanism is introduced to separate and reorganize features using the spatial reconstruction module (SRM) and channel reconstruction module (CRM), focusing on salient feature extraction and reducing background interference. Additionally, the annealing-integrated sparrow optimization algorithm fine-tunes the sparrow algorithm, gradually reducing the stochastic search amplitude to minimize loss. This enhances the model's adaptability and robustness, particularly against fuzzy edge features. The experimental results show that AISOA-SSformer achieves an 83.1% MIoU, an 80.3% Dice coefficient, and a 76.5% recall on a homemade dataset, with a model size of only 14.71 million parameters. Compared with other popular algorithms, it demonstrates greater accuracy in rice leaf disease segmentation. This method effectively improves segmentation, providing valuable insights for modern plantation management. The data and code used in this study will be open sourced at https://github.com/ZhouGuoXiong/Rice-Leaf-Disease-Segmentation-Dataset-Code.

Breast Cancer Detection using Image Processing and Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Review and Improved Segmentation Approach

Breast cancer stands as one of the most prevalent health concerns for women. Early detection of breast cancer can significantly improve the chances of survival. In developed countries, more than 19.9% of women will die per year due to breast cancer. Regular breast cancer screening is an important way to detect cancer early. Image processing techniques are highly used for different types of cancer detection applications with medical screening. Segmentation of the breast tumor region is a critical step in image processing related to this manner. Lots of research work can be found on developing ways for detecting breast cancers. However still, there is a need for a standard and robust cancer region segmentation method. Right cancer region segmentation is significant for better feature extraction and better classification. This study presents a comprehensive literature review about technologies used with image enhancement and tumor segmentation. Further, the study proposes a robust approach to image enhancement and cancer region segmentation for breast cancer detection using image processing techniques and machine learning. In this work, mammograms are enhanced using Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization and denoised using the Median blurring filter. This study enables an effective image segmentation approach with two stages: removing the background using thresholding, tumor region segmentation using a combination of thresholding, and Canny edge detection. Segmented tumor region’s features are extracted using the Gabor filter. Here the accuracy of the approach is compared with three main machine learning classifiers: Decision Tree, Random Forest, Multinomial Logistic Regression and mammograms are classified into three classes (malignant, benign and normal). Finally, an ensemble approach is proposed using the hard voting mechanism to improve the accuracy. With the dataset of mini-MIAS this proposed approach achieved 78.89% accuracy. Results demonstrated that the proposed breast cancer detection approach improves the performance of segmentation breast tumor regions.

CDRIME-MTIS: An enhanced rime optimization-driven multi-threshold segmentation for COVID-19 X-ray images

To improve the detection of COVID-19, this paper researches and proposes an effective swarm intelligence algorithm-driven multi-threshold image segmentation (MTIS) method. First, this paper proposes a novel RIME structure integrating the Co-adaptive hunting and dispersed foraging strategies, called CDRIME. Specifically, the Co-adaptive hunting strategy works in coordination with the basic search rules of RIME at the individual level, which not only facilitates the algorithm to explore the global optimal solution but also enriches the population diversity to a certain extent. The dispersed foraging strategy further enriches the population diversity to help the algorithm break the limitation of local search and thus obtain better convergence. Then, on this basis, a new multi-threshold image segmentation method is proposed by combining the 2D non-local histogram with 2D Kapur entropy, called CDRIME-MTIS. Finally, the results of experiments based on IEEE CEC2017, IEEE CEC2019, and IEEE CEC2022 demonstrate that CDRIME has superior performance than some other basic, advanced, and state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of global search, convergence performance, and escape from local optimality. Meanwhile, the segmentation experiments on COVID-19 X-ray images demonstrate that CDRIME is more advantageous than RIME and other peers in terms of segmentation effect and adaptability to different threshold levels. In conclusion, the proposed CDRIME significantly enhances the global optimization performance and image segmentation of RIME and has great potential to improve COVID-19 diagnosis.

Selective image segmentation driven by region, edge and saliency functions

Present active contour methods often struggle with the segmentation of regions displaying variations in texture, color, or intensity a phenomenon referred to as inhomogeneities. These limitation impairs their ability to precisely distinguish and outline diverse components within an image. Further some of these methods employ intricate mathematical formulations for energy minimization. Such complexity introduces computational sluggishness, making these methods unsuitable for tasks requiring real-time processing or rapid segmentation. Moreover, these methods are susceptible to being trapped in energy configurations corresponding to local minimum points. Consequently, the segmentation process fails to converge to the desired outcome. Additionally, the efficacy of these methods diminishes when confronted with regions exhibiting weak or subtle boundaries. To address these limitations comprehensively, our proposed approach introduces a fresh paradigm for image segmentation through the synchronization of region-based, edge-based, and saliency-based segmentation techniques. Initially, we adapt an intensity edge term based on the zero crossing feature detector (ZCD), which is used to highlight significant edges of an image. Secondly, a saliency function is formulated to detect salient regions from an image. We have also included a globally tuned region based SPF (signed pressure force) term to move contour away and capture homogeneous regions. ZCD, saliency and global SPF are jointly incorporated with some scaled value for the level set evolution to develop an effective image segmentation model. In addition, proposed method is capable to perform selective object segmentation, which enables us to choose any single or multiple objects inside an image. Saliency function and ZCD detector are considered feature enhancement tools, which are used to get important features of an image, so this method has a solid capacity to segment nature images (homogeneous or inhomogeneous) precisely. Finally, the adaption of the Gaussian kernel removes the need of any penalization term for level set reinitialization. Experimental results will exhibit the efficiency of the proposed method.

A few-shot learning-based ischemic stroke segmentation system using weighted MRI fusion

Stroke, particularly ischemic stroke, is a major cause of disability and one of the leading causes of adult mortality worldwide. Early and prompt management of stroke patients can reduce the severity of the disease. Doctors usually determine the severity of a stroke by focusing on the region of interest (ROI) in the MRI or CT scan images. An accurate and effective automatic image segmentation system can assist medical professionals as well as automatic detection and classification systems. Deep learning is the current advanced approach for dealing with machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, conventional deep learning requires a large amount of data for training, and the amount of labeled data in the medical field is limited. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning strategy and integrate it with a base convolutional neural network model, which utilizes a self-attention mechanism to segment MRI for ischemic stroke. By combining the base model with self-attention, we can focus more on the ROI and disregard less important features. Additionally, the proposed system only selects slices with lesions and ignores unlesioned slices. This helps to improve efficiency and reduce the computational load by eliminating the need to tune unnecessary parameters. To achieve even better results, the system also combines two weighted images, FLAIR and DWI, as an early fusion process. Experiments have shown that this approach leads to higher performance compared to using the same system without fusion. The proposed system is evaluated using a publicly available dataset, ISLES 2015 SSIS, and compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems. It achieves a dice coefficient score of 0.68, which is significantly better than that of other SOTA systems.

Enhancement and labelling of OCT images

Abstract Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive technique for visualizing retinal cross-sections, assisting in diagnosing and monitoring retinal diseases. This study presents an effective OCT image noise reduction and segmentation method. Due to the high resolution of our primary image database, a visual comparison of filter performance was challenging. To address this, we utilized a high-noise image dataset from Duke University, enabling a better evaluation of noise reduction filters. Our method was compared against eight widely-used image filters, including Gaussian, Low pass,Wavelet domain filtering, Lee filter, Anisotropic diffusion, Bilateral filter, Total variational filter, and BM3D filter. Both visual and quantitative analyses were conducted using no-reference performance parameters, namely Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation (GMSD), Standard Deviation of Wavelet Coefficients (SDWC), Focus Measure with Tengrade Variance (FMTV), Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQE), and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF). The results demonstrated the superiority of our proposed filter in terms of noise reduction performance while maintaining the sharpness of retinal layers. Quantitative analysis revealed notable performance gains, including improvements of 63.27% to 83.24% with GMSD, consistent edge strength enhancement of 9.4% to 9.97% using SDWC, gains in image quality between 51.99% and 54.64% with FMTV, performance improvements ranging from 7.25% to 23.97% in terms of PIQE, and a substantial increase in performance varying from 16.31% to 27.69% when assessing the impact on retinal layer quality using VIF. Using the Kruskal-Wallis test, our proposed noise reduction method shows statistical significance for all quantitative parameters. Additionally, our clustering algorithm effectively separated the foreground, including retinal layers and vitreous detachment, from the background and identified an area representing the region between retinal layers where fluid accumulates. We’ve successfully achieved OCT image enhancement, along with distinct foreground and background segmentation.

Cooperative Swarm Intelligence Algorithms for Adaptive Multilevel Thresholding Segmentation of COVID-19 CT-Scan Images

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is widespread throughout the world and poses a serious threat to public health and safety. A COVID-19 infection can be recognized using computed tomography (CT) scans. To enhance the categorization, some image segmentation techniques are presented to extract regions of interest from COVID-19 CT images. Multi-level thresholding (MLT) is one of the simplest and most effective image segmentation approaches, especially for grayscale images like CT scan images. Traditional image segmentation methods use histogram approaches; however, these approaches encounter some limitations. Now, swarm intelligence inspired meta-heuristic algorithms have been applied to resolve MLT, deemed an NP-hard optimization task. Despite the advantages of using meta-heuristics to solve global optimization tasks, each approach has its own drawbacks. However, the common flaw for most meta-heuristic algorithms is that they are unable to maintain the diversity of their population during the search, which means they might not always converge to the global optimum. This study proposes a cooperative swarm intelligence-based MLT image segmentation approach that hybridizes the advantages of parallel meta-heuristics and MLT for developing an efficient image segmentation method for COVID-19 CT images. An efficient cooperative model-based meta-heuristic called the CPGH is developed based on three practical algorithms: particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), and Harris hawks optimization (HHO). In the cooperative model, the applied algorithms are executed concurrently, and a number of potential solutions are moved across their populations through a procedure called migration after a set number of generations. The CPGH model can solve the image segmentation problem using MLT image segmentation. The proposed CPGH is evaluated using three objective functions, cross-entropy, Otsu’s, and Tsallis, over the COVID-19 CT images selected from open-sourced datasets. Various evaluation metrics covering peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and universal quality image index (UQI) were employed to quantify the segmentation quality. The overall ranking results of the segmentation quality metrics indicate that the performance of the proposed CPGH is better than conventional PSO, GWO, and HHO algorithms and other state-of-the-art methods for MLT image segmentation. On the tested COVID-19 CT images, the CPGH offered an average PSNR of 24.8062, SSIM of 0.8818, and UQI of 0.9097 using 20 thresholds.

Multi parallel U-net encoder network for effective polyp image segmentation

Automating polyps' detection and segmentation is very helpful in achieving early detection and potentially effective treatment of colon cancer. Because of the constant rise in processing power at a reasonable cost and the availability of training data, deep learning more than ever is becoming very powerful and increasingly widespread in many domains, including computer vision and medical image processing and segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel method for polyp image segmentation using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and utilizing multi-parallel U-Net encoder architecture. The proposed method uses multiple encoders that utilize pre-trained CNNs to enrich the extracted features. Skip connections from these parallel encoders are concatenated and propagated to the decoder in partially and fully meshed fashions allowing for data from shallow to deeper layers in the network to be exchanged and vice versa. We trained and tested the method on five publicly available datasets: Kvasir, CVC-Clinic DB, CVC-Colon DB, CVC-T, and ETIS-Larib, which are well-known benchmark datasets for polyp image segmentation. We tested the performance of the method on these five datasets using multiple testing scenarios including the effect of using attention, vision transformers, and multiple decoders. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on two of the used benchmark datasets and ranked second on a third.

Adaptive decoder-block selection with filter reweighting for medical image segmentation

Image segmentation models are mostly designed for specific tasks and trained on large-scale datasets. Medical image segmentation tasks, however, are highly diverse and usually have a small training dataset, making it difficult for a segmentation model to generalize well on other tasks. This architecture bias motivates a lot of research on designing a task-adaptive segmentation network with the most suitable settings including the network’s depth and width and feature fusion strategy. In this paper, we propose the adaptive Decoder-block Selection with Filter Reweighting (DeSFiR) algorithm to generate an efficient and effective medical image segmentation model for each specific dataset. This algorithm is a two-step iterative process. In the adaptive decoder-block selection step, we develop an auxiliary indicator function layer to bypass the decoder block whose individual responses are lower than a pre-defined threshold, aiming to generate a lightweight model. In the filter reweighing step, we replace invalid layers in the segmentation network with the external information from a simultaneously trained twin network. To this end, we utilize an entropy-based criterion to measure the informativeness of each layer and an adaptive weighting strategy to balance the replaced information between two networks. We have evaluated our algorithm on three tasks, including the segmentation of neural structures, nuclei, and liver. Our results indicate that the medical image segmentation model generated by the proposed DeSFiR algorithm has a significantly reduced complexity and comparable accuracy.

Effective image segmentation through MRI with fuzzy-based cell detection using deep learning

Effective image segmentation through MRI with fuzzy-based cell detection using deep learning

MSU-Net: Multi-scale Sensitive U-Net based on pixel-edge-region level collaborative loss for nasopharyngeal MRI segmentation

Radiotherapy is the traditional treatment of early nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Automatic accurate segmentation of risky lesions in the nasopharynx is crucial in radiotherapy. U-Net has been proved its effective medical image segmentation ability. However, the great difference in the structure and size of nasopharynx among different patients requires a network that pays more attention to multi-scale information. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale sensitive U-Net (MSU-Net) based on pixel-edge-region level collaborative loss (LCo−PER) for NPC segmentation task. A series of novel feature fusion modules based on spatial continuity and multi-scale semantic are proposed for extracting multi-level features while efficiently searching for all size lesions. A spatial continuity information extraction module (SCIEM) is proposed for effectively using the spatial continuity information of context slices to search small lesions. And a multi-scale semantic feature extraction module (MSFEM) is proposed for extracting features of different receptive fields. LCo−PER is proposed for the network training which makes network model could take into account the size of different lesions. The global Dice, Precision, Recall and IOU of the testing set are 84.50%, 97.48%, 84.33% and 82.41%, respectively. The results show that our method is better than the other state-of-the-art methods for NPC segmentation which obtain higher accuracy and effective segmentation performance.

TransU²-Net: An Effective Medical Image Segmentation Framework Based on Transformer and U²-Net.

In the past few years, U-Net based U-shaped architecture and skip-connections have made incredible progress in the field of medical image segmentation. U2-Net achieves good performance in computer vision. However, in the medical image segmentation task, U2-Net with over nesting is easy to overfit. A 2D network structure TransU2-Net combining transformer and a lighter weight U2-Net is proposed for automatic segmentation of brain tumor magnetic resonance image (MRI). The light-weight U2-Net architecture not only obtains multi-scale information but also reduces redundant feature extraction. Meanwhile, the transformer block embedded in the stacked convolutional layer obtains more global information; the transformer with skip-connection enhances spatial domain information representation. A new multi-scale feature map fusion strategy as a postprocessing method was proposed for better fusing high and low-dimensional spatial information. Our proposed model TransU2-Net achieves better segmentation results, on the BraTS2021 dataset, our method achieves an average dice coefficient of 88.17%; Evaluation on the publicly available MSD dataset, we perform tumor evaluation, we achieve a dice coefficient of 74.69%; in addition to comparing the TransU2-Net results are compared with previously proposed 2D segmentation methods. We propose an automatic medical image segmentation method combining transformers and U2-Net, which has good performance and is of clinical importance. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other 2D medical image segmentation methods. Clinical Translation Statement: We use the BarTS2021 dataset and the MSD dataset which are publicly available databases. All experiments in this paper are in accordance with medical ethics.

Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment Recommendation, and Multi-Class Tuberculosis Detection and Classification Using Ensemble Deep Learning-Based System.

This research develops the TB/non-TB detection and drug-resistant categorization diagnosis decision support system (TB-DRC-DSS). The model is capable of detecting both TB-negative and TB-positive samples, as well as classifying drug-resistant strains and also providing treatment recommendations. The model is developed using a deep learning ensemble model with the various CNN architectures. These architectures include EfficientNetB7, mobileNetV2, and Dense-Net121. The models are heterogeneously assembled to create an effective model for TB-DRC-DSS, utilizing effective image segmentation, augmentation, and decision fusion techniques to improve the classification efficacy of the current model. The web program serves as the platform for determining if a patient is positive or negative for tuberculosis and classifying several types of drug resistance. The constructed model is evaluated and compared to current methods described in the literature. The proposed model was assessed using two datasets of chest X-ray (CXR) images collected from the references. This collection of datasets includes the Portal dataset, the Montgomery County dataset, the Shenzhen dataset, and the Kaggle dataset. Seven thousand and eight images exist across all datasets. The dataset was divided into two subsets: the training dataset (80%) and the test dataset (20%). The computational result revealed that the classification accuracy of DS-TB against DR-TB has improved by an average of 43.3% compared to other methods. The categorization between DS-TB and MDR-TB, DS-TB and XDR-TB, and MDR-TB and XDR-TB was more accurate than with other methods by an average of 28.1%, 6.2%, and 9.4%, respectively. The accuracy of the embedded multiclass model in the web application is 92.6% when evaluated with the test dataset, but 92.8% when evaluated with a random subset selected from the aggregate dataset. In conclusion, 31 medical staff members have evaluated and utilized the online application, and the final user preference score for the web application is 9.52 out of a possible 10.