Abdomen tissues segmentation from computed tomography images using deep learning and level set methods.

Journal: Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE
Published Date:

Abstract

Accurate abdomen tissues segmentation is one of the crucial tasks in radiation therapy planning of related diseases. However, abdomen tissues segmentation (liver, kidney) is difficult because the low contrast between abdomen tissues and their surrounding organs. In this paper, an attention-based deep learning method for automated abdomen tissues segmentation is proposed. In our method, image cropping is first applied to the original images. U-net model with attention mechanism is then constructed to obtain the initial abdomen tissues. Finally, level set evolution which consists of three energy terms is used for optimize the initial abdomen segmentation. The proposed model is evaluated across 470 subsets. For liver segmentation, the mean dice are 96.2 and 95.1% for the FLARE21 datasets and the LiTS datasets, respectively. For kidney segmentation, the mean dice are 96.6 and 95.7% for the FLARE21 datasets and the LiTS datasets, respectively. Experimental evaluation exhibits that the proposed method can obtain better segmentation results than other methods.

Authors

  • Zhaoxuan Gong
    School of Computer, Shenyang Aerospace University, Shenyang, China.
  • Jing Song
    School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • Wei Guo
    Emergency Department, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
  • Ronghui Ju
  • Dazhe Zhao
    Medical Image Computing Laboratory of Ministry of Education, Northeastern University, 110819, Shenyang, China.
  • Wenjun Tan
    Key Laboratory of Medical Image Computing, Ministry of Education, Shenyang, China.
  • Wei Zhou
    Department of Eye Function Laboratory, Eye Hospital, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.
  • Guodong Zhang