RNGU-NET: a novel efficient approach in Segmenting Tuberculosis using chest X-Ray images

Abstract

Tuberculosis affects various tissues, including the lungs, kidneys, and brain. According to the medical report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020, approximately ten million people have been infected with tuberculosis. U-NET, a preferred method for detecting tuberculosis-like cases, is a convolutional neural network developed for segmentation in biomedical image processing. The proposed RNGU-NET architecture is a new segmentation technique combining the ResNet, Non-Local Block, and Gate Attention Block architectures. In the RNGU-NET design, the encoder phase is strengthened with ResNet, and the decoder phase incorporates the Gate Attention Block. The key innovation lies in the proposed Local Non-Local Block architecture, overcoming the bottleneck issue in U-Net models. In this study, the effectiveness of the proposed model in tuberculosis segmentation is compared to the U-NET, U-NET+ResNet, and RNGU-NET algorithms using the Shenzhen dataset. According to the results, the RNGU-NET architecture achieves the highest accuracy rate of 98.56%, Dice coefficient of 97.21%, and Jaccard index of 96.87% in tuberculosis segmentation. Conversely, the U-NET model exhibits the lowest accuracy and Jaccard index scores, while U-NET+ResNet has the poorest Dice coefficient. These findings underscore the success of the proposed RNGU-NET method in tuberculosis segmentation.

Keywords: Non-Local Block; Medical image segmentation; RNGU-Net model; Tuberculosis segmentation.