A Deep Learning Approach for Liver and Tumor Segmentation in CT Images Using ResUNet

Bioengineering (Basel). 2022 Aug 5;9(8):368. doi: 10.3390/bioengineering9080368.

Abstract

According to the most recent estimates from global cancer statistics for 2020, liver cancer is the ninth most common cancer in women. Segmenting the liver is difficult, and segmenting the tumor from the liver adds some difficulty. After a sample of liver tissue is taken, imaging tests, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computer tomography (CT), and ultrasound (US), are used to segment the liver and liver tumor. Due to overlapping intensity and variability in the position and shape of soft tissues, segmentation of the liver and tumor from computed abdominal tomography images based on shade gray or shapes is undesirable. This study proposed a more efficient method for segmenting liver and tumors from CT image volumes using a hybrid ResUNet model, combining the ResNet and UNet models to address this gap. The two overlapping models were primarily used in this study to segment the liver and for region of interest (ROI) assessment. Segmentation of the liver is done to examine the liver with an abdominal CT image volume. The proposed model is based on CT volume slices of patients with liver tumors and evaluated on the public 3D dataset IRCADB01. Based on the experimental analysis, the true value accuracy for liver segmentation was found to be approximately 99.55%, 97.85%, and 98.16%. The authentication rate of the dice coefficient also increased, indicating that the experiment went well and that the model is ready to use for the detection of liver tumors.

Keywords: computed tomography; deep learning; liver segmentation; medical imaging; residual network; tumor segmentation.