The segmentation of gastrointestinal (GI) organs is crucial in radiation therapy for treating GI cancer. It allows for developing a targeted radiation therapy plan while minimizing radiation exposure to healthy tissue, improving treatment success, and decreasing side effects. Medical diagnostics in GI tract organ segmentation is essential for accurate disease detection, precise differential diagnosis, optimal treatment planning, and efficient disease monitoring. This research presents a hybrid encoder-decoder-based model for segmenting healthy organs in the GI tract in biomedical images of cancer patients, which might help radiation oncologists treat cancer more quickly. Here, EfficientNet B0 is used as a bottom-up encoder architecture for downsampling to capture contextual information by extracting meaningful and discriminative features from input images. The performance of the EfficientNet B0 encoder is compared with that of three encoders: ResNet 50, MobileNet V2, and Timm Gernet. The Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) is a top-down decoder architecture used for upsampling to recover spatial information. The performance of the FPN decoder was compared with that of three decoders: PAN, Linknet, and MAnet. This paper proposes a segmentation model named as the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), with EfficientNet B0 as the encoder. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid model is analyzed using Adam, Adadelta, SGD, and RMSprop optimizers. Four performance criteria are used to assess the models: the Jaccard and Dice coefficients, model loss, and processing time. The proposed model can achieve Dice coefficient and Jaccard index values of 0.8975 and 0.8832, respectively. The proposed method can assist radiation oncologists in precisely targeting areas hosting cancer cells in the gastrointestinal tract, allowing for more efficient and timely cancer treatment.
Keywords: FPN; Linknet; MAnet; PAN; gastrointestinal tract; semantic segmentation.