SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION IN MEDICAL IMAGE ANALYSIS WITH CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Segmentation is one of the important and challenging tasks in medical image analysis. Region of Interest (RoI) needs to be segmented from the background in almost all types of medical images for further analysis. This assist doctors in perfect diagnosis of diseases. In this paper convolutional neural network (CNN) has been used for automatic segmentation of RoI in medical imaging modalities such as carotid artery ultrasound images. The results obtained through proposed CNN are compared with other machine learning algorithm such as support vector machine (SVM) and radial basis function (RBF). CNN exhibits an edge in performance with 10-fold cross validation over the other two networks with an accuracy of 99.3%. The results are also compared with other standard CNN architectures.

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.

The use of machine learning (ML) has been increasing rapidly in the medical imaging field, including computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), radiomics, and medical image analysis. Recently, an ML area called deep learning emerged in the computer vision field and became very popular in many fields. It started from an event in late 2012, when a deep-learning approach based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) won an overwhelming victory in the best-known worldwide computer vision competition, ImageNet Classification. Since then, researchers in virtually all fields, including medical imaging, have started actively participating in the explosively growing field of deep learning. In this paper, the area of deep learning in medical imaging is overviewed, including (1) what was changed in machine learning before and after the introduction of deep learning, (2) what is the source of the power of deep learning, (3) two major deep-learning models: a massive-training artificial neural network (MTANN) and a convolutional neural network (CNN), (4) similarities and differences between the two models, and (5) their applications to medical imaging. This review shows that ML with feature input (or feature-based ML) was dominant before the introduction of deep learning, and that the major and essential difference between ML before and after deep learning is the learning of image data directly without object segmentation or feature extraction; thus, it is the source of the power of deep learning, although the depth of the model is an important attribute. The class of ML with image input (or image-based ML) including deep learning has a long history, but recently gained popularity due to the use of the new terminology, deep learning. There are two major models in this class of ML in medical imaging, MTANN and CNN, which have similarities as well as several differences. In our experience, MTANNs were substantially more efficient in their development, had a higher performance, and required a lesser number of training cases than did CNNs. "Deep learning", or ML with image input, in medical imaging is an explosively growing, promising field. It is expected that ML with image input will be the mainstream area in the field of medical imaging in the next few decades.

Along with the development of medical imaging technology, medical image analysis has become a crucial part of clinical diagnosis. However, traditional image analysis methods rely on manual feature extraction and expert evaluation, triggering problems such as low efficiency and lack of accuracy. Deep learning techniques, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have made significant breakthroughs in medical image analysis in recent years. The aim of this paper is to study the application of deep learning in medical imaging, and explore the advantages and development potential in early disease diagnosis, image segmentation and feature extraction. This paper reviews the basic principles of deep learning and analyses the applicability of deep learning in medical imaging by combining the characteristics of medical imaging. Through systematic analysis of existing literature, this paper summarises the remarkable achievements of deep learning in processing, analysing and applying it to various medical images, such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and so on. It has been shown that deep learning methods can significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of medical image processing and demonstrate performance due to traditional methods in tasks such as classification. However, how to improve the interpretability of models and the generalisability of clinical applications are still current research hotspots and challenges.

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.

Numerous techniques, especially those based on deep learning (DL), have been developed and applied to a wide range of tasks, including image recognition, classification, object detection, and image segmentation, as a result of extensive research in the field of image processing. Image processing has become crucial in the medical field, with segmentation emerging as a crucial method for organ identification, disease detection, and abnormality analysis in medical images. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), one of the many approaches, have recently demonstrated great promise in resolving intricate problems associated with medical image analysis because of their capacity to automatically learn hierarchical features. In this review, we discuss recent developments in deep CNNs for medical image segmentation. The architectures and features of the most popular CNN-based models are examined, along with the different publicly accessible medical imaging datasets that are used in studies and the evaluation metrics that are frequently used to gauge segmentation performance and accuracy, also the advantages and disadvantages of each one. In addition, we look at comparative research and the shortcomings of existing approaches, offering suggestions for future lines of clinical relevance.

We address object detection using semantic segmentation and apply it for prostate detection in an MRI data-set. Our detection pipeline uses first a segmentation step followed by a classifier with a convolutional neural network (CNN). Since the segmentation provides a set of unbalanced data-sets – where a high accuracy is difficult to obtain – we leverage the prospect of improving detection accuracy using a Bayesian treatment of deep networks and the possibility of better exploiting the data using active learning. The resulting algorithm is both adaptive and data-efficient: by assuming that from a large pool of data only a few are segmented, the active learning module of the algorithm finds the image that improves most detection accuracy. We test our algorithm on a prostate medical image data-set and show that the active learning-based algorithm performs well in the prostate detection class. The resulting system is invariant to translations within the image and the results show improvements when using the pipeline that includes active learning and CNNs.

Medical image segmentation is crucial for improving healthcare outcomes. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely applied in medical image analysis; however, their inherent inductive biases limit their ability to capture global contextual information. Vision transformer (ViT) architectures address this limitation by leveraging attention mechanisms to model global relationships; however, they typically require large-scale datasets for effective training, which is challenging in the field of medical imaging due to limited data availability. This study aimed to integrate the advantages of CNN and ViT architectures to improve segmentation performance on small-scale medical image datasets. In this study, we established a U-shaped network architecture based on a Transformer-assisted convolutional neural network (TAC-UNet). The TAC-UNet is primarily composed of a hybrid structure integrating CNN and Transformer components. Specifically, the hybrid architecture follows a dual-path design in which the Transformer branch continuously conveys global contextual information to the CNN backbone. This allows the CNN backbone to enhance its global perception while building on the local features it extracts, thereby improving its ability to comprehend complex image structures. A channel cross-attention (CCA) module is also incorporated as a bridge between the encoder and decoder to better reconcile the semantic discrepancies between them. Detailed experiments on three public datasets were conducted. Specifically, our model was trained on 30 images from the Multi-organ Nucleus Segmentation (MoNuSeg) training dataset, 85 images from the Gland Segmentation (GlaS) training dataset, and 551 images from the Computer Vision Center Colorectal Cancer-Clinic Database (CVC-ClinicDB) dataset. We evaluated the performance of our model on the corresponding test sets. Our TAC-UNet achieved the best Dice scores (80.36%, 90.70%, and 91.81% on the MoNuSeg, GlaS, and CVC-ClinicDB datasets, respectively) of all the models. Compared to other CNN-based, Transformer-based, and hybrid methods, the TAC-UNet demonstrated significantly superior segmentation performance. Our TAC-UNet model showed advanced segmentation performance on small-scale medical image datasets. The detailed experimental results showed the effectiveness of the method. Our model's code is available at: https://github.com/hejlhello/TAC-UNet.

Radiological images, including X-rays, MRI, and CT scans, are essential modalities for disease diagnosis. However, the complexity of medical image data presents significant challenges in developing accurate and reliable classification models within the field of radiology. This study proposes a hybrid model that integrates an Autoencoder with a Random Forest classifier for disease classification based on radiological images. The Autoencoder is utilized to extract deep feature representations from the images, while the Random Forest serves as a robust classification algorithm. The research workflow involves preprocessing radiological image data to ensure quality and consistency, developing and training the Autoencoder to generate meaningful feature representations, and implementing the Random Forest as the classification model using the features extracted by the Autoencoder. The performance of the proposed hybrid model is evaluated by comparing it with baseline approaches, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and standalone Random Forest models, using evaluation metrics including accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, which are critical for assessing classification performance in medical imaging. This research aims to advance artificial intelligence applications in medical imaging, specifically for supporting disease diagnosis. The proposed model is anticipated to provide an efficient and reliable solution for processing radiological image data, thereby enhancing diagnostic capabilities and supporting clinical decision-making in the healthcare sector. The integration of deep feature extraction with robust classification is expected to address existing challenges in medical image analysis and contribute to the development of more effective diagnostic tools.

Medical image processing and analysis techniques play a significant role in diagnosing diseases. Thus, during the last decade, several noteworthy improvements in medical diagnostics have been made based on medical image processing techniques. In this article, we reviewed articles published in the most important journals and conferences that used or proposed medical image analysis techniques to diagnose diseases. Starting from four scientific databases, we applied the PRISMA technique to efficiently process and refine articles until we obtained forty research articles published in the last five years (2017–2021) aimed at answering our research questions. The medical image processing and analysis approaches were identified, examined, and discussed, including preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction, classification, evaluation metrics, and diagnosis techniques. This article also sheds light on machine learning and deep learning approaches. We also focused on the most important medical image processing techniques used in these articles to establish the best methodologies for future approaches, discussing the most efficient ones and proposing in this way a comprehensive reference source of methods of medical image processing and analysis that can be very useful in future medical diagnosis systems.

Over the past five years, artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced new models and methods for addressing the challenges associated with the broader adoption of AI models and systems in medicine. This paper reviews recent advances in AI for medical image and video analysis, outlines emerging paradigms, highlights pathways for successful clinical translation, and provides recommendations for future work. Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) Transformer architectures now deliver state-of-the-art results in segmentation, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, and registration. Foundation and generative AI models enable the use of transfer learning to smaller datasets with limited ground truth. Federated learning supports privacy-preserving collaboration across institutions. Explainable and trustworthy AI approaches have become essential to foster clinician trust, ensure regulatory compliance, and facilitate ethical deployment. Together, these developments pave the way for integrating AI into radiology, pathology, and wider healthcare workflows.

Segmentation is one of the popular and efficient technique in context to medical image analysis. The purpose of the segmentation is to clearly extract the Region of Interest from the medical images. The main focus of this paper is to review and summarize an efficient segmentation method. While doing the comparison study on segmentation methods using the Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest and the Convolutional Neural Network for medical image analysis identifies that Convolutional Neural Network works efficiently for doing in-depth analysis. The Convolutional Neural Network can be used as segmentation technique for achieving the high accuracy on medical image analysis.

The science of solving clinical problems by analyzing images generated in clinical practice is known as medical image analysis. The aim is to extract information in an affective and efficient manner for improved clinical diagnosis. The recent advances in the field of biomedical engineering have made medical image analysis one of the top research and development area. One of the reasons for this advancement is the application of machine learning techniques for the analysis of medical images. Deep learning is successfully used as a tool for machine learning, where a neural network is capable of automatically learning features. This is in contrast to those methods where traditionally hand crafted features are used. The selection and calculation of these features is a challenging task. Among deep learning techniques, deep convolutional networks are actively used for the purpose of medical image analysis. This includes application areas such as segmentation, abnormality detection, disease classification, computer aided diagnosis and retrieval. In this study, a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art in medical image analysis using deep convolutional networks is presented. The challenges and potential of these techniques are also highlighted.

Medical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning, but it requires models to capture fine local details and understand global contextual relationships. Although traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) perform well in extracting local features, their inherent local receptive fields limit their ability to model long-range dependencies. On the other hand, although Transformer models excel at capturing global information through self attention mechanisms, they may lose low-level spatial details that are crucial for accurate segmentation when processing images. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a novel parallel branch architecture called Trans CNN Fusion Network (TCF Net).This architecture synergistically combines a CNN encoder and a Swin Transformer encoder to extract both local texture features and global semantic information in parallel. The core innovation we designed is a Multi Scale Attention Fusion (MSAF) module that can intelligently and adaptively merge feature streams from two parallel branches, significantly outperforming simple feature concatenation methods. In addition, to address the common issue of class imbalance in medical images, we employed a hybrid Dice Focal loss function for model optimization. The experimental results on the publicly available BraTS 2021 brain tumor segmentation dataset show that TCF Net outperforms existing baseline models in all evaluation metrics, with an average Dice coefficient improved by 3.5% compared to TransUNet, demonstrating its outstanding performance and effectiveness in segmenting complex tumor subregions. This work provides a powerful new paradigm for high-precision automated medical image analysis.

Image semantic segmentation is an important branch of computer vision of a wide variety of practical applications such as medical image analysis, autonomous driving, virtual or augmented reality, etc. In recent years, due to the remarkable performance of transformer and multilayer perceptron (MLP) in computer vision, which is equivalent to convolutional neural network (CNN), there has been a substantial amount of image semantic segmentation works aimed at developing different types of deep learning architecture. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of deep learning methods in the field of general image semantic segmentation. Firstly, the commonly used image segmentation datasets are listed. Next, extensive pioneering works are deeply studied from multiple perspectives (e.g., network structures, feature fusion methods, attention mechanisms), and are divided into four categories according to different network architectures: CNN-based architectures, transformer-based architectures, MLP-based architectures, and others. Furthermore, this paper presents some common evaluation metrics and compares the respective advantages and limitations of popular techniques both in terms of architectural design and their experimental value on the most widely used datasets. Finally, possible future research directions and challenges are discussed for the reference of other researchers.