Bone malignant tumors are metastatic and aggressive. The manual screening of medical images is time-consuming and laborious, and computer technology is now being introduced to aid in diagnosis. Due to a large amount of noise and blurred lesion edges in osteosarcoma MRI images, high-precision segmentation methods require large computational resources and are difficult to use in developing countries with limited conditions. Therefore, this study proposes an artificial intelligence-aided diagnosis scheme by enhancing image edge features. First, a threshold screening filter (TSF) was used to pre-screen the MRI images to filter redundant data. Then, a fast NLM algorithm was introduced for denoising. Finally, a segmentation method with edge enhancement (TBNet) was designed to segment the pre-processed images by fusing Transformer based on the UNet network. TBNet is based on skip-free connected U-Net and includes a channel-edge cross-fusion transformer and a segmentation method with a combined loss function. This solution optimizes diagnostic efficiency and solves the segmentation problem of blurred edges, providing more help and reference for doctors to diagnose osteosarcoma. The results based on more than 4000 osteosarcoma MRI images show that our proposed method has a good segmentation effect and performance, with Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) reaching 0.949, and show that other evaluation indexes such as Intersection of Union (IOU) and recall are better than other methods.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; denoising; edge enhancement; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); osteosarcoma; pre-screening.