Medical Image Segmentation of PACS System Image Post-processing

Medical image segmentation, the process of precisely delineating regions of interest (e.g. organs, lesions, cells) within medical images, is a pivotal technique in medical image analysis. It finds widespread application in computer‐aided diagnosis, surgical planning, radiation therapy, and pathological analysis, thus playing a crucial role in enabling precision medicine and enhancing the quality of clinical care. Traditional medical image segmentation methods often rely on hand‐crafted features and rule‐based approaches, which struggle to handle the inherent complexity and variability of medical imagery, leading to limitations in segmentation accuracy and robustness. Recently, deep learning methodologies, driven by their powerful capabilities in automatic feature learning and non‐linear modelling, have overcome the limitations of traditional methods and achieved significant advancements in the field of medical image segmentation. This review provides a comprehensive overview and summary of recent progress in deep learning‐based medical image segmentation, with a particular focus on fully supervised learning paradigms leveraging convolutional neural networks, transformers, and the segment anything model. We delve into the underlying principles, network architectures, advantages, and limitations of these approaches. Furthermore, we systematically compare their performance across diverse imaging modalities, anatomical structures, and pathological targets. We also present a curated compilation of commonly used datasets, evaluation metrics, and loss functions relevant to medical image segmentation. Finally, we discuss future research directions and potential challenges, offering insights into the evolving landscape of this critical field.

Medical image segmentation as an earlier application field in image segmentation is the key technology of medical image analysis and is also a key point and difficulty in clinical application. This paper proposes an accurate and robust active contour model based on the four-phase level set for medical MR images. First we define a new energy functional by combining the data term and the length term, where the data term is defined by transforming the energy functional of the multiplicative intrinsic component optimization (MICO) model into the level set framework after adding an edge detector function. Then, when we minimize the energy functional, we use the split Bregman method to improve the convergence speed. To test the performance of our model, we do lots of experiments according to the different brain MR images, which show that even under the severe influence of bias field or shadows, our model can still segment these images well, and our model is robust to the initial contours and noise. Moreover, our model is compared with the MICO model by experimental results and the numerical values, concluding that our model is better than the MICO model no matter in segmentation accuracy or in correction effect.

DSEU-net: A novel deep supervision SEU-net for medical ultrasound image segmentation

Medical image processing and analysis operations, particularly segmentation, can benefit a great deal from prior information encoded to capture variations over a population in form, shape, anatomic layout, and image appearance of objects. Model/atlas-based methods are extant in medical image segmentation. Although multi-atlas/ multi-model methods have shown improved accuracy for image segmentation, if the atlases/models do not cover representatively the distinct groups, then the methods may not be generalizable to new populations. In a previous study, we have given an answer to address the following problem at image level: How many models/ atlases are needed for optimally encoding prior information to address the differing body habitus factor in a population? However, the number of models for different objects may be different, and at the image level, it may not be possible to infer the number of models needed for each object. So, the modified question to which we are now seeking an answer to in this paper is: How many models/ atlases are needed for optimally encoding prior information to address the differing body habitus factor for each object in a body region? To answer this question, we modified our method in the previous study for seeking the optimum grouping for a given population of images but focusing on the individual objects. We present our results on head and neck computed tomography (CT) scans of 298 patients.

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained tremendous popularity for various imaging related tasks such as artificial image generation to support AI training. GANs are especially useful for medical imaging-related tasks where training datasets are usually limited in size and heavily imbalanced against the diseased class. We present a systematic review, following the PRISMA guidelines, of recent GAN architectures used for medical image analysis to help the readers in making an informed decision before employing GANs in developing medical image classification and segmentation models. We have extracted 54 papers that highlight the capabilities and application of GANs in medical imaging from January 2015 to August 2020 and inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. Our results show four main architectures of GAN that are used for segmentation or classification in medical imaging. We provide a comprehensive overview of recent trends in the application of GANs in clinical diagnosis through medical image segmentation and classification and ultimately share experiences for task-based GAN implementations.

Deep learning has achieved great success in the field of computer vision, and the precision in image classification and image detection has surpassed humans. Therefore, this paper combines deep learning and medical image segmentation, focusing on how to improve the accuracy and speed of segmentation algorithm of medical exercise rehabilitation image. Aiming at the shortcomings of traditional medical image recognition methods, a medical exercise rehabilitation image segmentation algorithm based on hierarchical features of convolutional neural networks is proposed, this paper calls it as hierarchical features of convolutional neural networks (HFCNN). The algorithm firstly samples the convolution output of multiple layers in the convolutional neural network to a unified scale and combines them to construct a hierarchical feature. This hierarchical feature combines the structural information of objects contained in the shallow layer of the network with the semantic information of objects contained in the deep layers of the network, so it has a strong ability to express. Secondly, the image can be segmented into multiple super pixels by the super pixel segmentation algorithm. The classifier is trained using the hierarchical features of the super pixel, and then the classification result is mapped back to the pixel. Finally, a fully connected conditional random field algorithm including one-potential potential energy and paired potential energy is constructed. The corresponding energy function is used to smooth the classification result of the pixel, and the regional consistency and continuity of the pixel mark are improved. Compared with many classical convolutional neural network algorithms, this algorithm not only accelerates the network convergence speed, shortens the training time, but also significantly improves the accuracy of segmentation algorithm of medical exercise rehabilitation image, showing good practical value.

Multilevel thresholding for segmentation of medical brain images using real coded genetic algorithm

LCP-Net: A local context-perception deep neural network for medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image analysis, playing a crucial role in disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and clinical decision-making. Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures, such as blood vessels, organs, and lesions, is essential for reliable medical interpretations. However, existing segmentation models often face challenges in effectively capturing both local and global features within medical images. Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel at extracting fine-grained local features but struggle to model long-range dependencies due to their limited receptive fields. Conversely, transformer-based models can capture global contextual relationships but often fail to preserve detailed local structures, leading to suboptimal segmentation performance. The purpose of this study is to develop SEFormer, a novel hybrid network that integrates SENet, ResNet, and Transformer to enhance medical image segmentation. SEFormer aims to effectively capture both local and global features, addressing the limitations of traditional CNNs and transformer-based models.SENet is incorporated to recalibrate feature maps by adaptively emphasizing informative features, thereby compensating for the global representation limitations of CNNs. Meanwhile, the ResNet backbone ensures deep feature extraction while maintaining computational efficiency. Additionally, the Transformer module is introduced to capture long-range dependencies and enhance contextual awareness, complementing the local feature extraction capabilities of CNNs. This hybrid approach allows SEFormer to balance fine-grained spatial details with broader contextual information, leading to more precise segmentation results.Furthermore, to mitigate information loss during feature extraction and ensure a more complete and hierarchical representation of image information, we introduce a feature pyramid structure inspired by multi-scale image pyramid models. By progressively increasing the receptive field across different scales and employing skip connections, SEFormer effectively fuses multi-scale local and global features at each stage of the pyramid. This hierarchical fusion mechanism ensures a richer and more robust feature representation, which is particularly beneficial for segmenting complex medical structures such as blood vessels. We evaluate SEFormer on the CHASE_DB1 dataset, a widely used benchmark for retinal vessel segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that SEFormer outperforms existing state-of-the-art segmentation methods, achieving a 3.25% improvement in segmentation accuracy. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to verify the contributions of different components within SEFormer. The results show that incorporating SENet enhances feature recalibration and channel attention, while the Transformer module significantly improves global context awareness. The feature pyramid structure further contributes to performance gains by ensuring a multi-scale representation of vascular structures. Compared to conventional CNN-based methods, our approach achieves better segmentation accuracy with improved robustness to variations in vessel thickness, noise, and image contrast. Furthermore, SEFormer maintains computational efficiency, making it suitable for real-world clinical applications where both accuracy and processing speed are critical. SEFormer provides an efficient and accurate approach for medical image segmentation by leveraging the complementary strengths of CNNs, SENet, and Transformers while integrating a feature pyramid structure to maximize feature representation. Future research directions include extending SEFormer to other medical imaging modalities, such as CT and MRI scans, as well as exploring further optimization techniques to reduce computational costs while maintaining high segmentation performance. Additionally, integrating SEFormer with active learning frameworks could further improve segmentation performance by leveraging expert-annotated data more efficiently.

Machine learning techniques such as deep learning methods have produced promising results in medical images analysis. This work proposes a user-friendly system that utilizes deep learning techniques for detecting and diagnosing diseases using medical images. This includes the design of CAD-based project that can reduce human factor-related errors while performing manual screening of medical images. The system accepts medical images as input and performs segmentation of the images. Segmentation process analyzes and identifies the region of interest (ROI) of diseases from medical images. Analyzing and segmentation of medical images has assisted in the diagnosis and monitoring of some diseases. Diseases such as skin cancer, age-related fovea degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, and choroidal neovascularization can be effectively managed by the analysis of skin lesion and retinal vessels images. The proposed system was evaluated on diseases such as diabetic retinopathy from retina images and skin cancer from dermoscopic images.

Medical image segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image analysis and has been widely applied in multiple medical fields. The latest transformer-based deep learning segmentation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM), has demonstrated outstanding performance in natural image segmentation tasks through large-scale pre-training, achieving zero-shot image semantic understanding and pixel-level segmentation. However, medical images present challenges such as style variability, ill-defined object boundaries, and feature ambiguities, limiting the direct applicability of the SAM to medical image segmentation tasks. To enhance the robustness of the SAM in the domain of medical segmentation, we propose the SAM-RCCF framework. This approach aims to enhance the generalizability and precision of segmentation performance across diverse intracranial tumor types, including gliomas, metastatic tumors, and meningiomas. The study collected 484 axial T1-weighted contrast-enhanced (T1CE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of brain tumor patients, including 164 cases of glioma, 158 cases of metastatic tumors, and 162 cases of meningioma. All imaging data were randomly divided into training and testing sets. We employed the proposed SAM-RCCF model to perform segmentation experiments on these data, and five-fold cross-validation was adopted to evaluate the model's performance. This framework integrates the RefineNet module and the conditional control field with a conditional controller and Mask generator, enabling precise feature recognition and tailored segmentation for medical images, optimizing segmentation accuracy RESULTS: In the glioma segmentation experiment, the SAM-RCCF model achieved outstanding performance with an IOU of 0.90, DSC of 0.912, and HD of 13.13. For the meningioma segmentation task, it obtained an IOU of 0.9214, DSC of 0.93, and HD of 11.41, significantly outperforming other classic segmentation models. The segmentation experiment results demonstrate that in the segmentation tasks of glioma, metastatic tumors, and meningioma MRI images, the SAM-RCCF algorithm significantly outperformed the original SAM in terms of DSC, HD, and IOU segmentation performance metrics. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the SAM-RCCF framework in segmenting complex and variable brain tumor images, enhancing segmentation accuracy and robustness.

Accurate image segmentation is crucial in medical imaging for quantifying diseases, assessing prognosis, and evaluating treatment outcomes. However, existing methods often fall short in integrating global and local features in a meaningful way, failing to give sufficient attention to abnormal regions and boundary details in medical images. These limitations hinder the effectiveness of segmentation techniques in clinical settings. To address these issues, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach, MIPC-Net, designed for precise boundary segmentation in medical images. Our approach, inspired by radiologists' working patterns, introduces two distinct modules: 1. Mutual Inclusion of Position and Channel Attention (MIPC) Module: To improve boundary segmentation precision, we present the MIPC module. This module enhances the focus on channel information while extracting position features and vice versa, effectively enhancing the segmentation of boundaries in medical images. 2. Skip-Residue Module: To optimize the restoration of medical images, we introduce Skip-Residue, a global residual connection. This module improves the integration of the encoder and decoder by filtering out irrelevant information and recovering the most crucial information lost during the feature extraction process. We evaluate the performance of MIPC-Net on three publicly accessible datasets: Synapse, ISIC2018-Task, and Segpc. The evaluation uses metrics such as the Dice coefficient (DSC) and Hausdorff Distance (HD). Our ablation study confirms that each module contributes to the overall improvement of segmentation quality. Notably, with the integration of both modules, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all metrics. Specifically, MIPC-Net achieves a 2.23 mm reduction in Hausdorff Distance on the Synapse dataset, highlighting the model's enhanced capability for precise image boundary segmentation. The introduction of the novel MIPC and Skip-Residue modules significantly improves feature extraction accuracy, leading to better boundary recognition in medical image segmentation tasks. Our approach demonstrates substantial improvements over existing methods, as evidenced by the results on benchmark datasets.

Early detection and treatment are crucial for improving the prognosis of breast cancer. While ultrasound imaging is widely utilized for screening, its interpretation is subjective and heavily dependent on clinician expertise. Although supervised models have shown great promise in medical image segmentation, they encounter challenges such as the need for large labeled datasets, extended training times, and limited generalization to external datasets. We propose TFSeg, a Training-Free automatic image segmentation framework based on Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2). TFSeg eliminates the need for re-training new models and tuning hyper-parameters by generating image sequences through the retrieval of the top-k most similar images from the training set, using their mask prompts to guide SAM2 in achieving accurate and efficient segmentation. Our approach, validated on a breast ultrasound image dataset, achieved a Dice score of 82.66%, surpassing the performance of most supervised and training-free segmentation models. Notably, it achieved the highest precision (87.93%) among all the compared methods. By combining image retrieval with sequence generation, TFSeg leverages SAM2 to provide an efficient and effective solution for breast cancer ultrasound image segmentation and demonstrates potential for broader applications in medical image analysis. The Training-Free automatic image Segmentation framework addresses challenges associated with supervised models, making it a promising method for improving breast cancer diagnosis.

Medical image segmentation is a critical application of computer vision in the analysis of medical images. Its primary objective is to isolate regions of interest in medical images from the background, thereby assisting clinicians in accurately identifying lesions, their sizes, locations, and their relationships with surrounding tissues. However, compared to natural images, medical images present unique challenges, such as low resolution, poor contrast, inconsistency, and scattered target regions. Furthermore, the accuracy and stability of segmentation results are subject to more stringent requirements. In recent years, with the widespread application of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision, deep learning-based methods for medical image segmentation have become a focal point of research. This paper categorizes, reviews, and summarizes the current representative methods and research status in the field of medical image segmentation. A comparative analysis of relevant experiments is presented, along with an introduction to commonly used public datasets, performance evaluation metrics, and loss functions in medical image segmentation. Finally, potential future research directions and development trends in this field are predicted and analyzed.

In this paper, a novel level set approach is proposed for segmentation of medical ultrasound images. Considering the speckle noise and low contrast of medical ultrasound images, we add an extra stopping term into the formulation of level set evolution without re-initialization (LSEWR). Compared with traditional active contour models, the proposed level set approach has more flexible initialization and larger capture range. It is insensitive to the initial contour and larger time step can be used. The initial contour can be easily initialized as a circle or rectangular, thus achieving semi-automatic segmentation of ultrasound medical images. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be used for semi-automatic and high-quality segmentation of medical ultrasound images.