A lightweight neural network with multiscale feature enhancement for liver CT segmentation

Sci Rep. 2022 Aug 19;12(1):14153. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16828-6.

Abstract

Segmentation of abdominal Computed Tomography (CT) scan is essential for analyzing, diagnosing, and treating visceral organ diseases (e.g., hepatocellular carcinoma). This paper proposes a novel neural network (Res-PAC-UNet) that employs a fixed-width residual UNet backbone and Pyramid Atrous Convolutions, providing a low disk utilization method for precise liver CT segmentation. The proposed network is trained on medical segmentation decathlon dataset using a modified surface loss function. Additionally, we evaluate its quantitative and qualitative performance; the Res16-PAC-UNet achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.950 ± 0.019 with less than half a million parameters. Alternatively, the Res32-PAC-UNet obtains a Dice coefficient of 0.958 ± 0.015 with an acceptable parameter count of approximately 1.2 million.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted* / methods
  • Liver Neoplasms* / diagnostic imaging
  • Liver Neoplasms* / pathology
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods