Accurate Tumor Segmentation via Octave Convolution Neural Network.

Objective: Segmentation of liver and liver tumors from 3D medical images is a challenging and computationally expensive task. Organs that are in close proximity may have similar shape, texture, and intensity, which makes it difficult for accurate segmentation. Accurate segmentation of liver tumors is important for diagnosis and treatment planning of liver cancer. Methods: A hybrid model with a U-Net based structure and the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) was proposed. WOA was used to optimize the hyperparameters of the conventional LiTS-Res-UNet to obtain the best segmentation performance of the deep learning model. Results: The LiTS-Res-Unet + WOA hybrid model achieved a performance of 99.54% for accuracy, with a Dice coefficient of 92.38% and a Jaccard index of 86.73% on the benchmark dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Conclusions: The WOA-based adaptive search space was able to obtain an optimal set of hyperparameters for deep learning model convergence while increasing the accuracy of the model in the proposed hybrid model. The robust performance and clinical applicability of the model in liver tumor segmentation were demonstrated.

Hepatocellular carcinoma currently causes over 800 000 fatalities per year worldwide – and the number of cases is increasing. An early diagnosis and treatment play a crucial role in saving patients’ lives. The purpose of this study is the exploration of a robust and precise computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method using deep learning algorithms for liver tumor localization and segmentation. The difficulty of liver tumor segmentation lies within the recognition of the contrast between healthy and malignant tissues. This study proposes an implementation of a two-phased multi-scale and multi-resolution training pipeline to perform high accuracy in medical imaging segmentation tasks. For the experiments, the Liver Tumor Segmentation challenge (LiTS) public dataset was used. It contains 131 computed tomography (CT) images, out of which 82% show liver tumors with various shapes of lesion distribution. The final results show a dice per case score of 96.3% for liver segmentation and 72.5% for tumor segmentation when compared to the top LiTS results.

Weakly-Supervised teacher-Student network for liver tumor segmentation from non-enhanced images.

Segmentation of liver tumors is the process of voxel classification between tumor and healthy tissue performed from a volume of computed tomography. The increasing quality of medical image acquisition methods has allowed the identification, location, and diagnosis of diseases, avoiding very intrusive surgeries. This analysis is vital to decide the most appropriate treatment for the patient. In particular, the segmentation of the tumors is used to decide the feasibility of extracting the tumor and helps to specify the operative plan. The segmentation process of regions affected by tumors, when performed manually, requires time and experience from medical specialists, as it involves creating a tumor mask for each of the slices of the tomography. This task is particularly challenging when patients are located in poorly served regions and away from specialized medical services. Two types of approaches have traditionally been proposed to speed up and facilitate the segmentation of CT scans, one completely automatic and the other based on human intervention. In this work, we focus on fully automatic techniques for segmenting liver tumors. Despite the convolutional neural networks achieving significant results in the areas of image segmentation and classification, the segmentation of tomographic volumes presents new challenges, such as the introduction of a dimension of spatial relationships, artifacts from the extraction of images and a limited number of examples for training. In our research, we investigated the trade-off between computational resources and segmentation quality. Initially, we analyzed the performance of several convolutional networks 98and tested layers of different networks following the Effcient Net balancing model. Next, we expanded the layers for three-dimensional convolutions and tested layers that handled the dimensions of the volume separately. Finally, we evaluated the execution time of our models in equipment with limited processing and memory. Although our models have obtained inferior results in terms of effectiveness when compared to other methods in the literature, their execution proved to be viable in a restrictive computational environment. The experiments were performed on the liver tumor segmentation challenge (LiTS) database.

A state-of-the-art method for automatically segmenting liver tumours using Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) is shown in this study. This study is significant because it uses a 4D information deep learning model to tackle the hard problem of liver tumor segmentation. A combination of 3D CNNs and ConvLSTM networks, specifically built to capture spatial and temporal information inside the dynamic imaging sequence of DCE-MRI, is what the suggested model is all about. Utilizing diffusion-computed tomography (DCE-MRI) gives a lot of information vital for precise tumor segmentation by providing a complete picture of the vascular dynamics in the liver. The model makes use of spatial and temporal elements by combining 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with ConvLSTM networks; this allows for a more detailed comprehension of the changes that are happening over time. To overcome the difficulties caused by the constantly changing nature of DCE-MRI data, this integration of 4D information greatly improves the accuracy and consistency of liver tumor segmentation. Implementing and optimizing the suggested deep learning model are the main goals of this work. The training and calibration of the model to accurately capture liver tumor characteristics in dynamic imaging sequences is of utmost importance.

Liver cancer is a life threatening illness and one of the fastest growing cancer in the world.Segmenting liver tumors from computed tomography(CT) images is crucial for the diagnosis and management of liver cancer.The variety of appearances, hazy borders, variable densities, forms and sizes of lesions of tumors makes it challenging .This work introduces a liver tumor segmentation method based on the Liver Tumor Segmentation (LITS) dataset.U-net model is used to segment the lesions in the tumor.A convolutional neural network architecture created especially for semantic segmentation problems is used to implement a Unet model for liver tumor segmentation.U-Net and Seg-Net models demonstrate better segmentation performance by utilizing the extensive annotated data present in the LITS dataset.To produce the segmentation output , the encoder down samples the input picture through convolutional and pooling layers, while the decoder up samples the feature map.The last layer is sigmoid activation function the task is likely binary segmentation.The outcomes of the experiment confirm the efficacy of the suggested method, demonstrating its potential to improve diagnostic precision in medical environments.Dice-coefficient, Dice-loss,F1 score are the metrics used to calculate the performance of the segmented images

Accurate segmentation of liver tumors is an important guarantee for the success of liver cancer surgery, where convolutional network has been a type of popular method. However, the performance of the traditional convolutional network is limited by the network depth. To improve the accuracy of liver tumor segmentation, we propose a cascaded deep fully convolutional network (DFCN) which uses ResNet as the basis network followed by side output layer in the upsampling stage to fuse multi-scale image features. For better localizing the liver tumors, the segmentation result is further refined by a fully connected conditional random field. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves higher segmentation accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods.

Accurate liver tumor segmentation is critical for the diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer, yet remains challenging due to image quality and tumor heterogeneity. Existing methods predominantly focus on single-phase and single-time-point CT scans, neglecting complementary multi-phase information and longitudinal correlations. In this paper, we propose the first multi-modal multi-temporal network, which integrates diverse information from arterial phase and longitudinal data to facilitate liver tumor segmentation of venous phase. Our approach mainly comprises three novel blocks: (1) A polynomial residual block that captures abundant tumor characteristics via nonlinear hierarchical feature learning; (2) A longitudinal phase attention block that refines input features from channel and spatial dimensions, and recalibrates the target feature based on inter-phase and inter-temporal dependencies; (3) A progressive up-sampling block that preserves structural details during resolution restoration, and forms an effective decoder architecture. Experiments on a large-scale CT dataset of longitudinal multi-phase liver tumors demonstrate that the proposed network achieves promising liver tumor segmentation and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In addition, an ablation study validates the functions of the proposed blocks.

Segmentation of liver tumors from Computed Tomography (CT) and tumor burden analysis play an important role in the choice of therapeutic strategies for liver diseases and treatment monitoring. In this paper, a new segmentation method for liver tumors from contrast-enhanced CT imaging is proposed. As manual segmentation of tumors for liver treatment planning is both labor intensive and time-consuming, a highly accurate automatic tumor segmentation is desired. The proposed framework is fully automatic requiring no user interaction. The proposed segmentation evaluated on real-world clinical data from patients is based on a hybrid method integrating cuckoo optimization and fuzzy c-means algorithm with random walkers algorithm. The accuracy of the proposed method was validated using a clinical liver dataset containing one of the highest numbers of tumors utilized for liver tumor segmentation containing 127 tumors in total with further validation of the results by a consultant radiologist. The proposed method was able to achieve one of the highest accuracies reported in the literature for liver tumor segmentation compared to other segmentation methods with a mean overlap error of 22.78 % and dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 in 3Dircadb dataset and a mean overlap error of 15.61 % and dice similarity coefficient of 0.81 in MIDAS dataset. The proposed method was able to outperform most other tumor segmentation methods reported in the literature while representing an overlap error improvement of 6 % compared to one of the best performing automatic methods in the literature. The proposed framework was able to provide consistently accurate results considering the number of tumors and the variations in tumor contrast enhancements and tumor appearances while the tumor burden was estimated with a mean error of 0.84 % in 3Dircadb dataset.

Automatic liver tumor segmentation from 3D Computed Tomography (CT) is a necessary prerequisite in the interventions of hepatic abnormalities and surgery planning. However, accurate liver tumor segmentation remains challenging due to the large variability of tumor sizes and inhomogeneous texture. Recent advances based on Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) in liver tumor segmentation draw on success of learning discriminative multi-level features. In this paper, we propose a Deep Attentive Refinement Network (DARN) for improved liver tumor segmentation from CT volumes by fully exploiting both low and high level features embedded in different layers of FCN. Different from existing works, we exploit attention mechanism to leverage the relation of different levels of features encoded in different layers of FCN. Specifically, we introduce a Semantic Attention Refinement (SemRef) module to selectively emphasize global semantic information in low level features with the guidance of high level ones, and a Spatial Attention Refinement (SpaRef) module to adaptively enhance spatial details in high level features with the guidance of low level ones. We evaluate our network on the public MICCAI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge dataset (LiTS dataset) and it achieves state-of-the-art performance. The proposed refinement modules are an effective strategy to exploit multi-level features and has great potential to generalize to other medical image segmentation tasks.

Liver cancer is a major global health challenge, significantly contributing to mortality rates. The accurate segmentation of liver and tumors from clinical CT images plays a crucial role in selecting therapeutic strategies for liver disease and treatment monitoring but remains challenging due to liver shape variability, proximity to other organs, low contrast between tumors and healthy tissues, and unclear lesion boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose the Deep Residual Dual-Attention Network (DRDA-Net), a novel model for end-to-end liver and tumor segmentation. DRDA-Net integrates a Residual UNet architecture with dual-attention mechanisms, multi-scale tile and patch extraction, and an Ensemble method. The dual-attention mechanisms enhance focus on key regions, addressing variations in size, shape, and intensity, while the multi-scale approach captures fine details and broader contexts. Additionally, we introduce a unique pre-processing pipeline employing a two-channel denoising technique using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and stationary wavelet transforms (SWTs) to reduce noise while preserving structural details. Evaluated on the 3DIRCADb dataset, DRDA-Net achieved Dice scores of 97.03% and 75.4% for liver and tumor segmentation, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate the model’s effectiveness in overcoming segmentation challenges and highlight its potential to improve liver cancer diagnostics and treatment planning.

Cancer plays a major risk for public health worldwide. According to the survey made by the cancer society predicts approximate about 42,220 new cases will be diagnosed and around 32,220 people will die of this cancer that is around 71% of people will die in 2018 and Liver cancer rate is increased by 3% for every year since 2000 and achieved second leading place for the cause of death. There is a con-tinuous in the development with regard to prevent and different options for treating the cancer. Detection of cancer at its initial stages is very difficult with the help of pathological information’s, so as any added support CAD systems using CT scan images are being designed from few decades in order to find out cancer in its early stage. In this paper discussed various segmentation techniques and liver tumor detection techniques to initial segment out the liver region from the abdominal and then to extract the efficient characteristics. Based on the characteristics presences of tumour is identified and separated out from the liver and finally analyse the stage of the cancer. Therefore the process is divided into three parts; 1.Region segmentation, 2.Liver Tumour segmentation and 3.Detection of Cancer stage. In this paper, study is done on different methods of liver region and tumour segmentation of abdominal CT scan to analyze liver tumor and detection of early stage of the tumor

The incidence of liver tumors is among the top three in China. The treatments of benign and malignant tumors are different. Accurate diagnosis plays an important role in guiding the treatment of tumors. The aim of this study is to solve the following: (1) blurred boundary between the liver tumor and other organs causes incorrect segmentation of liver tumor boundaries; (2) large difference in tumor size and the diversity in texture and grayscale are major challenges in liver tumor classification tasks. Firstly, the liver tumor is segmented from the original CT images by a tumor segmentation network, UNet++ with fusion loss and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (FLAS-UNet++). The proposed segmentation method can solve the problem of tumor edge segmentation error by learning the tumor edge information. Secondly they are adaptively cropped according to the tumor volume to reduce the over-fitting and over-sensitivity of the deep network. Thirdly an improved Dense Block is designed to pay more attention to the changes in grayscale and texture between benign and malignant tumors. Finally, the features extracted from the network combined with tumor volume, patient's sex and age, are sent to a classifier for diagnosis. Liver tumor segmentation results show that the dice, HD95 reached 71.9%, 12.1 mm, respectively. The classification results show that the accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and area under curve reached 82.4%, 79.8%, 84.4%, 87.5%, respectively. The segmentation and classification results are both better than other's methods and mainstream networks. In order to solve existing problems of liver tumor CT image classification methods, our method realizes the accurate segmentation and classification of liver tumors in CT images and has important clinical application value.

Accurate kidney and tumor segmentation of computed tomography (CT) scans is vital for diagnosis and treatment, but manual methods are time-consuming and inconsistent, highlighting the value of AI automation. This study develops a fully automated AI model using vision transformers (ViTs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to detect and segment kidneys and kidney tumors in Contrast-Enhanced (CECT) scans, with a focus on improving sensitivity for small, indistinct tumors. The segmentation framework employs a ViT-based model for the kidney organ, followed by a 3D UNet model with enhanced connections and attention mechanisms for tumor detection and segmentation. Two CECT datasets were used: a public dataset (KiTS23: 489 scans) and a private institutional dataset (Private: 592 scans). The AI model was trained on 389 public scans, with validation performed on the remaining 100 scans and external validation performed on all 592 private scans. Tumors were categorized by TNM staging as small (≤4 cm) (KiTS23: 54%, Private: 41%), medium (>4 cm to ≤7 cm) (KiTS23: 24%, Private: 35%), and large (>7 cm) (KiTS23: 22%, Private: 24%) for detailed evaluation. Kidney and kidney tumor segmentations were evaluated against manual annotations as the reference standard. The model achieved a Dice score of 0.97 ± 0.02 for kidney organ segmentation. For tumor detection and segmentation on the KiTS23 dataset, the sensitivities and average false-positive rates per patient were as follows: 0.90 and 0.23 for small tumors, 1.0 and 0.08 for medium tumors, and 0.96 and 0.04 for large tumors. The corresponding Dice scores were 0.84 ± 0.11, 0.89 ± 0.07, and 0.91 ± 0.06, respectively. External validation on the private data confirmed the model's effectiveness, achieving the following sensitivities and average false-positive rates per patient: 0.89 and 0.15 for small tumors, 0.99 and 0.03 for medium tumors, and 1.0 and 0.01 for large tumors. The corresponding Dice scores were 0.84 ± 0.08, 0.89 ± 0.08, and 0.92 ± 0.06. The proposed model demonstrates consistent and robust performance in segmenting kidneys and kidney tumors of various sizes, with effective generalization to unseen data. This underscores the model's significant potential for clinical integration, offering enhanced diagnostic precision and reliability in radiological assessments.

Interlayer information fusion-based and dual-attention improved U-Net for ABVS image sequence intelligent tumor segmentation