FcTC-UNet: Fine-grained Combination of Transformer and CNN for Thoracic Organs Segmentation

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2022 Jul:2022:4749-4753. doi: 10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9870880.

Abstract

Precise segmentation of organs at risk (OARs) in computed tomography (CT) images is an essential step for lung cancer radiotherapy. However, the manual delineation of OARs is time-consuming and subject to inter-observer variation. Although U-like architecture has achieved great success in medical image segmentation recently, it exhibits the limitations in modeling long-range dependencies. As an alternative structure, Transformers have emerged due to the outstanding capability of capturing the global contextual information provided by Self-Attention(SA) mechanism. However, Transformers need more computational cost than CNNs for introducing the SA module. In this paper, we propose a novel module named fine-grained combination of Transformer and CNN(FcTC). FcTC module is composed of dual-path extractor and fusing unit to effectively extract local information and model long-distance dependency. Then we build FcTC-UNet to automatically segment the OARs in thoracic CT images. The experiments results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance over other state-of-the-art methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Electric Power Supplies
  • Humans
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Observer Variation
  • Organs at Risk*
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods