Existing semi-supervisedmedical image segmentation algorithms use copy-paste data augmentation to correct the labeled-unlabeled data distribution mismatch.However,current copy-paste methods have three limitations:(1)t...Existing semi-supervisedmedical image segmentation algorithms use copy-paste data augmentation to correct the labeled-unlabeled data distribution mismatch.However,current copy-paste methods have three limitations:(1)training the model solely with copy-paste mixed pictures from labeled and unlabeled input loses a lot of labeled information;(2)low-quality pseudo-labels can cause confirmation bias in pseudo-supervised learning on unlabeled data;(3)the segmentation performance in low-contrast and local regions is less than optimal.We design a Stochastic Augmentation-Based Dual-Teaching Auxiliary Training Strategy(SADT),which enhances feature diversity and learns high-quality features to overcome these problems.To be more precise,SADT trains the Student Network by using pseudo-label-based training from Teacher Network 1 and supervised learning with labeled data,which prevents the loss of rare labeled data.We introduce a bi-directional copy-pastemask with progressive high-entropy filtering to reduce data distribution disparities and mitigate confirmation bias in pseudo-supervision.For the mixed images,Deep-Shallow Spatial Contrastive Learning(DSSCL)is proposed in the feature spaces of Teacher Network 2 and the Student Network to improve the segmentation capabilities in low-contrast and local areas.In this procedure,the features retrieved by the Student Network are subjected to a random feature perturbation technique.On two openly available datasets,extensive trials show that our proposed SADT performs much better than the state-ofthe-art semi-supervised medical segmentation techniques.Using only 10%of the labeled data for training,SADT was able to acquire a Dice score of 90.10%on the ACDC(Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge)dataset.展开更多
Medical image segmentation has become a cornerstone for many healthcare applications,allowing for the automated extraction of critical information from images such as Computed Tomography(CT)scans,Magnetic Resonance Im...Medical image segmentation has become a cornerstone for many healthcare applications,allowing for the automated extraction of critical information from images such as Computed Tomography(CT)scans,Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRIs),and X-rays.The introduction of U-Net in 2015 has significantly advanced segmentation capabilities,especially for small datasets commonly found in medical imaging.Since then,various modifications to the original U-Net architecture have been proposed to enhance segmentation accuracy and tackle challenges like class imbalance,data scarcity,and multi-modal image processing.This paper provides a detailed review and comparison of several U-Net-based architectures,focusing on their effectiveness in medical image segmentation tasks.We evaluate performance metrics such as Dice Similarity Coefficient(DSC)and Intersection over Union(IoU)across different U-Net variants including HmsU-Net,CrossU-Net,mResU-Net,and others.Our results indicate that architectural enhancements such as transformers,attention mechanisms,and residual connections improve segmentation performance across diverse medical imaging applications,including tumor detection,organ segmentation,and lesion identification.The study also identifies current challenges in the field,including data variability,limited dataset sizes,and issues with class imbalance.Based on these findings,the paper suggests potential future directions for improving the robustness and clinical applicability of U-Net-based models in medical image segmentation.展开更多
Image segmentation is attracting increasing attention in the field of medical image analysis.Since widespread utilization across various medical applications,ensuring and improving segmentation accuracy has become a c...Image segmentation is attracting increasing attention in the field of medical image analysis.Since widespread utilization across various medical applications,ensuring and improving segmentation accuracy has become a crucial topic of research.With advances in deep learning,researchers have developed numerous methods that combine Transformers and convolutional neural networks(CNNs)to create highly accurate models for medical image segmentation.However,efforts to further enhance accuracy by developing larger and more complex models or training with more extensive datasets,significantly increase computational resource consumption.To address this problem,we propose BiCLIP-nnFormer(the prefix"Bi"refers to the use of two distinct CLIP models),a virtual multimodal instrument that leverages CLIP models to enhance the segmentation performance of a medical segmentation model nnFormer.Since two CLIP models(PMC-CLIP and CoCa-CLIP)are pre-trained on large datasets,they do not require additional training,thus conserving computation resources.These models are used offline to extract image and text embeddings from medical images.These embeddings are then processed by the proposed 3D CLIP adapter,which adapts the CLIP knowledge for segmentation tasks by fine-tuning.Finally,the adapted embeddings are fused with feature maps extracted from the nnFormer encoder for generating predicted masks.This process enriches the representation capabilities of the feature maps by integrating global multimodal information,leading to more precise segmentation predictions.We demonstrate the superiority of BiCLIP-nnFormer and the effectiveness of using CLIP models to enhance nnFormer through experiments on two public datasets,namely the Synapse multi-organ segmentation dataset(Synapse)and the Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge dataset(ACDC),as well as a self-annotated lung multi-category segmentation dataset(LMCS).展开更多
The self-attention mechanism of Transformers,which captures long-range contextual information,has demonstrated significant potential in image segmentation.However,their ability to learn local,contextual relationships ...The self-attention mechanism of Transformers,which captures long-range contextual information,has demonstrated significant potential in image segmentation.However,their ability to learn local,contextual relationships between pixels requires further improvement.Previous methods face challenges in efficiently managing multi-scale fea-tures of different granularities from the encoder backbone,leaving room for improvement in their global representation and feature extraction capabilities.To address these challenges,we propose a novel Decoder with Multi-Head Feature Receptors(DMHFR),which receives multi-scale features from the encoder backbone and organizes them into three feature groups with different granularities:coarse,fine-grained,and full set.These groups are subsequently processed by Multi-Head Feature Receptors(MHFRs)after feature capture and modeling operations.MHFRs include two Three-Head Feature Receptors(THFRs)and one Four-Head Feature Receptor(FHFR).Each group of features is passed through these MHFRs and then fed into axial transformers,which help the model capture long-range dependencies within the features.The three MHFRs produce three distinct feature outputs.The output from the FHFR serves as auxiliary auxiliary features in the prediction head,and the prediction output and their losses will eventually be aggregated.Experimental results show that the Transformer using DMHFR outperforms 15 state of the arts(SOTA)methods on five public datasets.Specifically,it achieved significant improvements in mean DICE scores over the classic Parallel Reverse Attention Network(PraNet)method,with gains of 4.1%,2.2%,1.4%,8.9%,and 16.3%on the CVC-ClinicDB,Kvasir-SEG,CVC-T,CVC-ColonDB,and ETIS-LaribPolypDB datasets,respectively.展开更多
Despite its remarkable performance on natural images,the segment anything model(SAM)lacks domain-specific information in medical imaging.and faces the challenge of losing local multi-scale information in the encoding ...Despite its remarkable performance on natural images,the segment anything model(SAM)lacks domain-specific information in medical imaging.and faces the challenge of losing local multi-scale information in the encoding phase.This paper presents a medical image segmentation model based on SAM with a local multi-scale feature encoder(LMSFE-SAM)to address the issues above.Firstly,based on the SAM,a local multi-scale feature encoder is introduced to improve the representation of features within local receptive field,thereby supplying the Vision Transformer(ViT)branch in SAM with enriched local multi-scale contextual information.At the same time,a multiaxial Hadamard product module(MHPM)is incorporated into the local multi-scale feature encoder in a lightweight manner to reduce the quadratic complexity and noise interference.Subsequently,a cross-branch balancing adapter is designed to balance the local and global information between the local multi-scale feature encoder and the ViT encoder in SAM.Finally,to obtain smaller input image size and to mitigate overlapping in patch embeddings,the size of the input image is reduced from 1024×1024 pixels to 256×256 pixels,and a multidimensional information adaptation component is developed,which includes feature adapters,position adapters,and channel-spatial adapters.This component effectively integrates the information from small-sized medical images into SAM,enhancing its suitability for clinical deployment.The proposed model demonstrates an average enhancement ranging from 0.0387 to 0.3191 across six objective evaluation metrics on BUSI,DDTI,and TN3K datasets compared to eight other representative image segmentation models.This significantly enhances the performance of the SAM on medical images,providing clinicians with a powerful tool in clinical diagnosis.展开更多
In the field of medical image processing,combining global and local relationship modeling constitutes an effective strategy for precise segmentation.Prior research has established the validity of Convolutional Neural ...In the field of medical image processing,combining global and local relationship modeling constitutes an effective strategy for precise segmentation.Prior research has established the validity of Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN)in modeling local relationships.Conversely,Transformers have demonstrated their capability to effectively capture global contextual information.However,when utilized to address CNNs’limitations in modeling global relationships,Transformers are hindered by substantial computational complexity.To address this issue,we introduce Mamba,a State-Space Model(SSM)that exhibits exceptional proficiency in modeling long-range dependencies in sequential data.Given Mamba’s demonstrated potential in 2D medical image segmentation in previous studies,we have designed a Dual-encoder Global-local Feature Extraction Network based on Mamba,termed DGFE-Mamba,to accurately capture and fuse long-range dependencies and local dependencies within multi-scale features.Compared to Transformer-based methods,the DGFE-Mamba model excels in comprehensive feature modeling and demonstrates significantly improved segmentation accuracy.To validate the effectiveness and practicality of DGFE-Mamba,we conducted tests on the Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge(ACDC)dataset,the Synapse multi-organ CT abdominal segmentation dataset,and the Colorectal Cancer Clinic(CVC-ClinicDB)dataset.The results showed that DGFE-Mamba achieved Dice coefficients of 92.20,83.67,and 94.13,respectively.These findings comprehensively validate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed DGFE-Mamba architecture.展开更多
A growing number of skin laser treatments have rapidly evolved and increased their role in the field of dermatology,laser treatment is considered to be used for a variety of pigmentary dermatosis as well as aesthetic ...A growing number of skin laser treatments have rapidly evolved and increased their role in the field of dermatology,laser treatment is considered to be used for a variety of pigmentary dermatosis as well as aesthetic problems.The standardized assessment of laser treatment efficacy is crucial for the interpretation and comparison of studies related to laser treatment of skin disorders.In this study,we propose an evaluation method to quantitatively assess laser treatment efficacy based on the image segmentation technology.A tattoo model of Sprague Dawley(SD)rats was established and treated by picosecond laser treatments at varying energy levels.Images of the tattoo models were captured before and after laser treatment,and feature extraction was conducted to quantify the tattooed area and pigment gradation.Subsequently,the clearance rate,which has been a standardized parameter,was calculated.The results indicate that the clearance rates obtained through this quantitative algorithm are comparable and exhibit smaller standard deviations compared with scale scores(4.59%versus 7.93%in the low-energy group,4.01%versus 9.05%in the medium-energy group,and 4.29%versus 10.23%in the high-energy group).This underscores the greater accuracy,objectivity,and reproducibility in assessing treatment responses.The quantitative evaluation of pigment removal holds promise for facilitating faster and more robust assessments in research and development.Additionally,it may enable the optimization of treatments tailored to individual patients,thereby contributing to more effective and personalized dermatological care.展开更多
Data augmentation plays an important role in training deep neural model by expanding the size and diversity of the dataset.Initially,data augmentation mainly involved some simple transformations of images.Later,in ord...Data augmentation plays an important role in training deep neural model by expanding the size and diversity of the dataset.Initially,data augmentation mainly involved some simple transformations of images.Later,in order to increase the diversity and complexity of data,more advanced methods appeared and evolved to sophisticated generative models.However,these methods required a mass of computation of training or searching.In this paper,a novel training-free method that utilises the Pre-Trained Segment Anything Model(SAM)model as a data augmentation tool(PTSAM-DA)is proposed to generate the augmented annotations for images.Without the need for training,it obtains prompt boxes from the original annotations and then feeds the boxes to the pre-trained SAM to generate diverse and improved annotations.In this way,annotations are augmented more ingenious than simple manipulations without incurring huge computation for training a data augmentation model.Multiple comparative experiments on three datasets are conducted,including an in-house dataset,ADE20K and COCO2017.On this in-house dataset,namely Agricultural Plot Segmentation Dataset,maximum improvements of 3.77%and 8.92%are gained in two mainstream metrics,mIoU and mAcc,respectively.Consequently,large vision models like SAM are proven to be promising not only in image segmentation but also in data augmentation.展开更多
Deep learning(DL),derived from the domain of Artificial Neural Networks(ANN),forms one of the most essential components of modern deep learning algorithms.DL segmentation models rely on layer-by-layer convolution-base...Deep learning(DL),derived from the domain of Artificial Neural Networks(ANN),forms one of the most essential components of modern deep learning algorithms.DL segmentation models rely on layer-by-layer convolution-based feature representation,guided by forward and backward propagation.Acritical aspect of this process is the selection of an appropriate activation function(AF)to ensure robustmodel learning.However,existing activation functions often fail to effectively address the vanishing gradient problem or are complicated by the need for manual parameter tuning.Most current research on activation function design focuses on classification tasks using natural image datasets such asMNIST,CIFAR-10,and CIFAR-100.To address this gap,this study proposesMed-ReLU,a novel activation function specifically designed for medical image segmentation.Med-ReLU prevents deep learning models fromsuffering dead neurons or vanishing gradient issues.It is a hybrid activation function that combines the properties of ReLU and Softsign.For positive inputs,Med-ReLU adopts the linear behavior of ReLU to avoid vanishing gradients,while for negative inputs,it exhibits the Softsign’s polynomial convergence,ensuring robust training and avoiding inactive neurons across the training set.The training performance and segmentation accuracy ofMed-ReLU have been thoroughly evaluated,demonstrating stable learning behavior and resistance to overfitting.It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art activation functions inmedical image segmentation tasks.Designed as a parameter-free function,Med-ReLU is simple to implement in complex deep learning architectures,and its effectiveness spans various neural network models and anomaly detection scenarios.展开更多
In the realm of medical image segmentation,particularly in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging(MRI),achieving robust performance with limited annotated data is a significant challenge.Performance often degrades when fa...In the realm of medical image segmentation,particularly in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging(MRI),achieving robust performance with limited annotated data is a significant challenge.Performance often degrades when faced with testing scenarios from unknown domains.To address this problem,this paper proposes a novel semi-supervised approach for cardiac magnetic resonance image segmentation,aiming to enhance predictive capabilities and domain generalization(DG).This paper establishes an MT-like model utilizing pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization from semi-supervised learning,and integrates uncertainty estimation to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels.Additionally,to tackle the challenge of domain generalization,a data manipulation strategy is introduced,extracting spatial and content-related information from images across different domains,enriching the dataset with a multi-domain perspective.This papers method is meticulously evaluated on the publicly available cardiac magnetic resonance imaging dataset M&Ms,validating its effectiveness.Comparative analyses against various methods highlight the out-standing performance of this papers approach,demonstrating its capability to segment cardiac magnetic resonance images in previously unseen domains even with limited annotated data.展开更多
Medical image segmentation,i.e.,labeling structures of interest in medical images,is crucial for disease diagnosis and treatment in radiology.In reversible data hiding in medical images(RDHMI),segmentation consists of...Medical image segmentation,i.e.,labeling structures of interest in medical images,is crucial for disease diagnosis and treatment in radiology.In reversible data hiding in medical images(RDHMI),segmentation consists of only two regions:the focal and nonfocal regions.The focal region mainly contains information for diagnosis,while the nonfocal region serves as the monochrome background.The current traditional segmentation methods utilized in RDHMI are inaccurate for complex medical images,and manual segmentation is time-consuming,poorly reproducible,and operator-dependent.Implementing state-of-the-art deep learning(DL)models will facilitate key benefits,but the lack of domain-specific labels for existing medical datasets makes it impossible.To address this problem,this study provides labels of existing medical datasets based on a hybrid segmentation approach to facilitate the implementation of DL segmentation models in this domain.First,an initial segmentation based on a 33 kernel is performed to analyze×identified contour pixels before classifying pixels into focal and nonfocal regions.Then,several human expert raters evaluate and classify the generated labels into accurate and inaccurate labels.The inaccurate labels undergo manual segmentation by medical practitioners and are scored based on a hierarchical voting scheme before being assigned to the proposed dataset.To ensure reliability and integrity in the proposed dataset,we evaluate the accurate automated labels with manually segmented labels by medical practitioners using five assessment metrics:dice coefficient,Jaccard index,precision,recall,and accuracy.The experimental results show labels in the proposed dataset are consistent with the subjective judgment of human experts,with an average accuracy score of 94%and dice coefficient scores between 90%-99%.The study further proposes a ResNet-UNet with concatenated spatial and channel squeeze and excitation(scSE)architecture for semantic segmentation to validate and illustrate the usefulness of the proposed dataset.The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed architecture in accurately separating the focal and nonfocal regions compared to state-of-the-art architectures.Dataset information is released under the following URL:https://www.kaggle.com/lordamoah/datasets(accessed on 31 March 2025).展开更多
Convolutional neural networks(CNNs)-based medical image segmentation technologies have been widely used in medical image segmentation because of their strong representation and generalization abilities.However,due to ...Convolutional neural networks(CNNs)-based medical image segmentation technologies have been widely used in medical image segmentation because of their strong representation and generalization abilities.However,due to the inability to effectively capture global information from images,CNNs can easily lead to loss of contours and textures in segmentation results.Notice that the transformer model can effectively capture the properties of long-range dependencies in the image,and furthermore,combining the CNN and the transformer can effectively extract local details and global contextual features of the image.Motivated by this,we propose a multi-branch and multi-scale attention network(M2ANet)for medical image segmentation,whose architecture consists of three components.Specifically,in the first component,we construct an adaptive multi-branch patch module for parallel extraction of image features to reduce information loss caused by downsampling.In the second component,we apply residual block to the well-known convolutional block attention module to enhance the network’s ability to recognize important features of images and alleviate the phenomenon of gradient vanishing.In the third component,we design a multi-scale feature fusion module,in which we adopt adaptive average pooling and position encoding to enhance contextual features,and then multi-head attention is introduced to further enrich feature representation.Finally,we validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed M2ANet method through comparative experiments on four benchmark medical image segmentation datasets,particularly in the context of preserving contours and textures.展开更多
Convolutional neural network(CNN)with the encoder-decoder structure is popular in medical image segmentation due to its excellent local feature extraction ability but it faces limitations in capturing the global featu...Convolutional neural network(CNN)with the encoder-decoder structure is popular in medical image segmentation due to its excellent local feature extraction ability but it faces limitations in capturing the global feature.The transformer can extract the global information well but adapting it to small medical datasets is challenging and its computational complexity can be heavy.In this work,a serial and parallel network is proposed for the accurate 3D medical image segmentation by combining CNN and transformer and promoting feature interactions across various semantic levels.The core components of the proposed method include the cross window self-attention based transformer(CWST)and multi-scale local enhanced(MLE)modules.The CWST module enhances the global context understanding by partitioning 3D images into non-overlapping windows and calculating sparse global attention between windows.The MLE module selectively fuses features by computing the voxel attention between different branch features,and uses convolution to strengthen the dense local information.The experiments on the prostate,atrium,and pancreas MR/CT image datasets consistently demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over six popular segmentation models in both qualitative evaluation and quantitative indexes such as dice similarity coefficient,Intersection over Union,95%Hausdorff distance and average symmetric surface distance.展开更多
Medical image segmentation is a crucial task in clinical applications.However,obtaining labeled data for medical images is often challenging.This has led to the appeal of semi-supervised learning(SSL),a technique adep...Medical image segmentation is a crucial task in clinical applications.However,obtaining labeled data for medical images is often challenging.This has led to the appeal of semi-supervised learning(SSL),a technique adept at leveraging a modest amount of labeled data.Nonetheless,most prevailing SSL segmentation methods for medical images either rely on the single consistency training method or directly fine-tune SSL methods designed for natural images.In this paper,we propose an innovative semi-supervised method called multi-consistency training(MCT)for medical image segmentation.Our approach transcends the constraints of prior methodologies by considering consistency from a dual perspective:output consistency across different up-sampling methods and output consistency of the same data within the same network under various perturbations to the intermediate features.We design distinct semi-supervised loss regression methods for these two types of consistencies.To enhance the application of our MCT model,we also develop a dedicated decoder as the core of our neural network.Thorough experiments were conducted on the polyp dataset and the dental dataset,rigorously compared against other SSL methods.Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach,achieving higher segmentation accuracy.Moreover,comprehensive ablation studies and insightful discussion substantiate the efficacy of our approach in navigating the intricacies of medical image segmentation.展开更多
Identification of the ice channel is the basic technology for developing intelligent ships in ice-covered waters,which is important to ensure the safety and economy of navigation.In the Arctic,merchant ships with low ...Identification of the ice channel is the basic technology for developing intelligent ships in ice-covered waters,which is important to ensure the safety and economy of navigation.In the Arctic,merchant ships with low ice class often navigate in channels opened up by icebreakers.Navigation in the ice channel often depends on good maneuverability skills and abundant experience from the captain to a large extent.The ship may get stuck if steered into ice fields off the channel.Under this circumstance,it is very important to study how to identify the boundary lines of ice channels with a reliable method.In this paper,a two-staged ice channel identification method is developed based on image segmentation and corner point regression.The first stage employs the image segmentation method to extract channel regions.In the second stage,an intelligent corner regression network is proposed to extract the channel boundary lines from the channel region.A non-intelligent angle-based filtering and clustering method is proposed and compared with corner point regression network.The training and evaluation of the segmentation method and corner regression network are carried out on the synthetic and real ice channel dataset.The evaluation results show that the accuracy of the method using the corner point regression network in the second stage is achieved as high as 73.33%on the synthetic ice channel dataset and 70.66%on the real ice channel dataset,and the processing speed can reach up to 14.58frames per second.展开更多
In this paper,we design an efficient,multi-stage image segmentation framework that incorporates a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation(AITV).The segmentation framework generally consists of...In this paper,we design an efficient,multi-stage image segmentation framework that incorporates a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation(AITV).The segmentation framework generally consists of two stages:smoothing and thresholding,thus referred to as smoothing-and-thresholding(SaT).In the first stage,a smoothed image is obtained by an AITV-regularized Mumford-Shah(MS)model,which can be solved efficiently by the alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMMs)with a closed-form solution of a proximal operator of the l_(1)-αl_(2) regularizer.The convergence of the ADMM algorithm is analyzed.In the second stage,we threshold the smoothed image by K-means clustering to obtain the final segmentation result.Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed segmentation framework is versatile for both grayscale and color images,effcient in producing high-quality segmentation results within a few seconds,and robust to input images that are corrupted with noise,blur,or both.We compare the AITV method with its original convex TV and nonconvex TVP(O<p<1)counterparts,showcasing the qualitative and quantitative advantages of our proposed method.展开更多
Medical image segmentation has witnessed rapid advancements with the emergence of encoder-decoder based methods.In the encoder-decoder structure,the primary goal of the decoding phase is not only to restore feature ma...Medical image segmentation has witnessed rapid advancements with the emergence of encoder-decoder based methods.In the encoder-decoder structure,the primary goal of the decoding phase is not only to restore feature map resolution,but also to mitigate the loss of feature information incurred during the encoding phase.However,this approach gives rise to a challenge:multiple up-sampling operations in the decoder segment result in the loss of feature information.To address this challenge,we propose a novel network that removes the decoding structure to reduce feature information loss(CBL-Net).In particular,we introduce a Parallel Pooling Module(PPM)to counteract the feature information loss stemming from conventional and pooling operations during the encoding stage.Furthermore,we incorporate a Multiplexed Dilation Convolution(MDC)module to expand the network's receptive field.Also,although we have removed the decoding stage,we still need to recover the feature map resolution.Therefore,we introduced the Global Feature Recovery(GFR)module.It uses attention mechanism for the image feature map resolution recovery,which can effectively reduce the loss of feature information.We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on three publicly available medical image segmentation datasets:DRIVE,CHASEDB and MoNuSeg datasets.Experimental results show that our proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in medical image segmentation.In addition,it achieves higher efficiency than the current network of coding and decoding structures by eliminating the decoding component.展开更多
Automatic segmentation of medical images provides a reliable scientific basis for disease diagnosis and analysis.Notably,most existing methods that combine the strengths of convolutional neural networks(CNNs)and Trans...Automatic segmentation of medical images provides a reliable scientific basis for disease diagnosis and analysis.Notably,most existing methods that combine the strengths of convolutional neural networks(CNNs)and Transformers have made significant progress.However,there are some limitations in the current integration of CNN and Transformer technology in two key aspects.Firstly,most methods either overlook or fail to fully incorporate the complementary nature between local and global features.Secondly,the significance of integrating the multiscale encoder features from the dual-branch network to enhance the decoding features is often disregarded in methods that combine CNN and Transformer.To address this issue,we present a groundbreaking dual-branch cross-attention fusion network(DCFNet),which efficiently combines the power of Swin Transformer and CNN to generate complementary global and local features.We then designed the Feature Cross-Fusion(FCF)module to efficiently fuse local and global features.In the FCF,the utilization of the Channel-wise Cross-fusion Transformer(CCT)serves the purpose of aggregatingmulti-scale features,and the Feature FusionModule(FFM)is employed to effectively aggregate dual-branch prominent feature regions from the spatial perspective.Furthermore,within the decoding phase of the dual-branch network,our proposed Channel Attention Block(CAB)aims to emphasize the significance of the channel features between the up-sampled features and the features generated by the FCFmodule to enhance the details of the decoding.Experimental results demonstrate that DCFNet exhibits enhanced accuracy in segmentation performance.Compared to other state-of-the-art(SOTA)methods,our segmentation framework exhibits a superior level of competitiveness.DCFNet’s accurate segmentation of medical images can greatly assist medical professionals in making crucial diagnoses of lesion areas in advance.展开更多
To enhance the diversity and distribution uniformity of initial population,as well as to avoid local extrema in the Chimp Optimization Algorithm(CHOA),this paper improves the CHOA based on chaos initialization and Cau...To enhance the diversity and distribution uniformity of initial population,as well as to avoid local extrema in the Chimp Optimization Algorithm(CHOA),this paper improves the CHOA based on chaos initialization and Cauchy mutation.First,Sin chaos is introduced to improve the random population initialization scheme of the CHOA,which not only guarantees the diversity of the population,but also enhances the distribution uniformity of the initial population.Next,Cauchy mutation is added to optimize the global search ability of the CHOA in the process of position(threshold)updating to avoid the CHOA falling into local optima.Finally,an improved CHOA was formed through the combination of chaos initialization and Cauchy mutation(CICMCHOA),then taking fuzzy Kapur as the objective function,this paper applied CICMCHOA to natural and medical image segmentation,and compared it with four algorithms,including the improved Satin Bowerbird optimizer(ISBO),Cuckoo Search(ICS),etc.The experimental results deriving from visual and specific indicators demonstrate that CICMCHOA delivers superior segmentation effects in image segmentation.展开更多
In this paper,we consider the Chan–Vese(C-V)model for image segmentation and obtain its numerical solution accurately and efficiently.For this purpose,we present a local radial basis function method based on a Gaussi...In this paper,we consider the Chan–Vese(C-V)model for image segmentation and obtain its numerical solution accurately and efficiently.For this purpose,we present a local radial basis function method based on a Gaussian kernel(GA-LRBF)for spatial discretization.Compared to the standard radial basis functionmethod,this approach consumes less CPU time and maintains good stability because it uses only a small subset of points in the whole computational domain.Additionally,since the Gaussian function has the property of dimensional separation,the GA-LRBF method is suitable for dealing with isotropic images.Finally,a numerical scheme that couples GA-LRBF with the fourth-order Runge–Kutta method is applied to the C-V model,and a comparison of some numerical results demonstrates that this scheme achieves much more reliable image segmentation.展开更多
基金supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China(No.41804112,author:Chengyun Song).
文摘Existing semi-supervisedmedical image segmentation algorithms use copy-paste data augmentation to correct the labeled-unlabeled data distribution mismatch.However,current copy-paste methods have three limitations:(1)training the model solely with copy-paste mixed pictures from labeled and unlabeled input loses a lot of labeled information;(2)low-quality pseudo-labels can cause confirmation bias in pseudo-supervised learning on unlabeled data;(3)the segmentation performance in low-contrast and local regions is less than optimal.We design a Stochastic Augmentation-Based Dual-Teaching Auxiliary Training Strategy(SADT),which enhances feature diversity and learns high-quality features to overcome these problems.To be more precise,SADT trains the Student Network by using pseudo-label-based training from Teacher Network 1 and supervised learning with labeled data,which prevents the loss of rare labeled data.We introduce a bi-directional copy-pastemask with progressive high-entropy filtering to reduce data distribution disparities and mitigate confirmation bias in pseudo-supervision.For the mixed images,Deep-Shallow Spatial Contrastive Learning(DSSCL)is proposed in the feature spaces of Teacher Network 2 and the Student Network to improve the segmentation capabilities in low-contrast and local areas.In this procedure,the features retrieved by the Student Network are subjected to a random feature perturbation technique.On two openly available datasets,extensive trials show that our proposed SADT performs much better than the state-ofthe-art semi-supervised medical segmentation techniques.Using only 10%of the labeled data for training,SADT was able to acquire a Dice score of 90.10%on the ACDC(Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge)dataset.
文摘Medical image segmentation has become a cornerstone for many healthcare applications,allowing for the automated extraction of critical information from images such as Computed Tomography(CT)scans,Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRIs),and X-rays.The introduction of U-Net in 2015 has significantly advanced segmentation capabilities,especially for small datasets commonly found in medical imaging.Since then,various modifications to the original U-Net architecture have been proposed to enhance segmentation accuracy and tackle challenges like class imbalance,data scarcity,and multi-modal image processing.This paper provides a detailed review and comparison of several U-Net-based architectures,focusing on their effectiveness in medical image segmentation tasks.We evaluate performance metrics such as Dice Similarity Coefficient(DSC)and Intersection over Union(IoU)across different U-Net variants including HmsU-Net,CrossU-Net,mResU-Net,and others.Our results indicate that architectural enhancements such as transformers,attention mechanisms,and residual connections improve segmentation performance across diverse medical imaging applications,including tumor detection,organ segmentation,and lesion identification.The study also identifies current challenges in the field,including data variability,limited dataset sizes,and issues with class imbalance.Based on these findings,the paper suggests potential future directions for improving the robustness and clinical applicability of U-Net-based models in medical image segmentation.
基金funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.6240072655)the Hubei Provincial Key Research and Development Program(Grant No.2023BCB151)+1 种基金the Wuhan Natural Science Foundation Exploration Program(Chenguang Program,Grant No.2024040801020202)the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province of China(Grant No.2025AFB148).
文摘Image segmentation is attracting increasing attention in the field of medical image analysis.Since widespread utilization across various medical applications,ensuring and improving segmentation accuracy has become a crucial topic of research.With advances in deep learning,researchers have developed numerous methods that combine Transformers and convolutional neural networks(CNNs)to create highly accurate models for medical image segmentation.However,efforts to further enhance accuracy by developing larger and more complex models or training with more extensive datasets,significantly increase computational resource consumption.To address this problem,we propose BiCLIP-nnFormer(the prefix"Bi"refers to the use of two distinct CLIP models),a virtual multimodal instrument that leverages CLIP models to enhance the segmentation performance of a medical segmentation model nnFormer.Since two CLIP models(PMC-CLIP and CoCa-CLIP)are pre-trained on large datasets,they do not require additional training,thus conserving computation resources.These models are used offline to extract image and text embeddings from medical images.These embeddings are then processed by the proposed 3D CLIP adapter,which adapts the CLIP knowledge for segmentation tasks by fine-tuning.Finally,the adapted embeddings are fused with feature maps extracted from the nnFormer encoder for generating predicted masks.This process enriches the representation capabilities of the feature maps by integrating global multimodal information,leading to more precise segmentation predictions.We demonstrate the superiority of BiCLIP-nnFormer and the effectiveness of using CLIP models to enhance nnFormer through experiments on two public datasets,namely the Synapse multi-organ segmentation dataset(Synapse)and the Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge dataset(ACDC),as well as a self-annotated lung multi-category segmentation dataset(LMCS).
基金supported by Xiamen Medical and Health Guidance Project in 2021(No.3502Z20214ZD1070)supported by a grant from Guangxi Key Laboratory of Machine Vision and Intelligent Control,China(No.2023B02).
文摘The self-attention mechanism of Transformers,which captures long-range contextual information,has demonstrated significant potential in image segmentation.However,their ability to learn local,contextual relationships between pixels requires further improvement.Previous methods face challenges in efficiently managing multi-scale fea-tures of different granularities from the encoder backbone,leaving room for improvement in their global representation and feature extraction capabilities.To address these challenges,we propose a novel Decoder with Multi-Head Feature Receptors(DMHFR),which receives multi-scale features from the encoder backbone and organizes them into three feature groups with different granularities:coarse,fine-grained,and full set.These groups are subsequently processed by Multi-Head Feature Receptors(MHFRs)after feature capture and modeling operations.MHFRs include two Three-Head Feature Receptors(THFRs)and one Four-Head Feature Receptor(FHFR).Each group of features is passed through these MHFRs and then fed into axial transformers,which help the model capture long-range dependencies within the features.The three MHFRs produce three distinct feature outputs.The output from the FHFR serves as auxiliary auxiliary features in the prediction head,and the prediction output and their losses will eventually be aggregated.Experimental results show that the Transformer using DMHFR outperforms 15 state of the arts(SOTA)methods on five public datasets.Specifically,it achieved significant improvements in mean DICE scores over the classic Parallel Reverse Attention Network(PraNet)method,with gains of 4.1%,2.2%,1.4%,8.9%,and 16.3%on the CVC-ClinicDB,Kvasir-SEG,CVC-T,CVC-ColonDB,and ETIS-LaribPolypDB datasets,respectively.
基金supported by Natural Science Foundation Programme of Gansu Province(No.24JRRA231)National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.62061023)Gansu Provincial Science and Technology Plan Key Research and Development Program Project(No.24YFFA024).
文摘Despite its remarkable performance on natural images,the segment anything model(SAM)lacks domain-specific information in medical imaging.and faces the challenge of losing local multi-scale information in the encoding phase.This paper presents a medical image segmentation model based on SAM with a local multi-scale feature encoder(LMSFE-SAM)to address the issues above.Firstly,based on the SAM,a local multi-scale feature encoder is introduced to improve the representation of features within local receptive field,thereby supplying the Vision Transformer(ViT)branch in SAM with enriched local multi-scale contextual information.At the same time,a multiaxial Hadamard product module(MHPM)is incorporated into the local multi-scale feature encoder in a lightweight manner to reduce the quadratic complexity and noise interference.Subsequently,a cross-branch balancing adapter is designed to balance the local and global information between the local multi-scale feature encoder and the ViT encoder in SAM.Finally,to obtain smaller input image size and to mitigate overlapping in patch embeddings,the size of the input image is reduced from 1024×1024 pixels to 256×256 pixels,and a multidimensional information adaptation component is developed,which includes feature adapters,position adapters,and channel-spatial adapters.This component effectively integrates the information from small-sized medical images into SAM,enhancing its suitability for clinical deployment.The proposed model demonstrates an average enhancement ranging from 0.0387 to 0.3191 across six objective evaluation metrics on BUSI,DDTI,and TN3K datasets compared to eight other representative image segmentation models.This significantly enhances the performance of the SAM on medical images,providing clinicians with a powerful tool in clinical diagnosis.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(62276092,62303167)the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program(Grade C)of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(GZC20230707)+3 种基金the Key Science and Technology Program of Henan Province,China(242102211051)MRC(MC_PC_17171)Royal Society(RP202G0230)BHF(AA/18/3/34220)。
文摘In the field of medical image processing,combining global and local relationship modeling constitutes an effective strategy for precise segmentation.Prior research has established the validity of Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN)in modeling local relationships.Conversely,Transformers have demonstrated their capability to effectively capture global contextual information.However,when utilized to address CNNs’limitations in modeling global relationships,Transformers are hindered by substantial computational complexity.To address this issue,we introduce Mamba,a State-Space Model(SSM)that exhibits exceptional proficiency in modeling long-range dependencies in sequential data.Given Mamba’s demonstrated potential in 2D medical image segmentation in previous studies,we have designed a Dual-encoder Global-local Feature Extraction Network based on Mamba,termed DGFE-Mamba,to accurately capture and fuse long-range dependencies and local dependencies within multi-scale features.Compared to Transformer-based methods,the DGFE-Mamba model excels in comprehensive feature modeling and demonstrates significantly improved segmentation accuracy.To validate the effectiveness and practicality of DGFE-Mamba,we conducted tests on the Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge(ACDC)dataset,the Synapse multi-organ CT abdominal segmentation dataset,and the Colorectal Cancer Clinic(CVC-ClinicDB)dataset.The results showed that DGFE-Mamba achieved Dice coefficients of 92.20,83.67,and 94.13,respectively.These findings comprehensively validate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed DGFE-Mamba architecture.
基金supported by The Shanghai Science and Technology Commission(21S31902700)。
文摘A growing number of skin laser treatments have rapidly evolved and increased their role in the field of dermatology,laser treatment is considered to be used for a variety of pigmentary dermatosis as well as aesthetic problems.The standardized assessment of laser treatment efficacy is crucial for the interpretation and comparison of studies related to laser treatment of skin disorders.In this study,we propose an evaluation method to quantitatively assess laser treatment efficacy based on the image segmentation technology.A tattoo model of Sprague Dawley(SD)rats was established and treated by picosecond laser treatments at varying energy levels.Images of the tattoo models were captured before and after laser treatment,and feature extraction was conducted to quantify the tattooed area and pigment gradation.Subsequently,the clearance rate,which has been a standardized parameter,was calculated.The results indicate that the clearance rates obtained through this quantitative algorithm are comparable and exhibit smaller standard deviations compared with scale scores(4.59%versus 7.93%in the low-energy group,4.01%versus 9.05%in the medium-energy group,and 4.29%versus 10.23%in the high-energy group).This underscores the greater accuracy,objectivity,and reproducibility in assessing treatment responses.The quantitative evaluation of pigment removal holds promise for facilitating faster and more robust assessments in research and development.Additionally,it may enable the optimization of treatments tailored to individual patients,thereby contributing to more effective and personalized dermatological care.
基金Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province,Grant/Award Number:LY23F020025Science and Technology Commissioner Program of Huzhou,Grant/Award Number:2023GZ42Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Support Program,Grant/Award Numbers:2023ZHCG0005,2023ZHCG0008。
文摘Data augmentation plays an important role in training deep neural model by expanding the size and diversity of the dataset.Initially,data augmentation mainly involved some simple transformations of images.Later,in order to increase the diversity and complexity of data,more advanced methods appeared and evolved to sophisticated generative models.However,these methods required a mass of computation of training or searching.In this paper,a novel training-free method that utilises the Pre-Trained Segment Anything Model(SAM)model as a data augmentation tool(PTSAM-DA)is proposed to generate the augmented annotations for images.Without the need for training,it obtains prompt boxes from the original annotations and then feeds the boxes to the pre-trained SAM to generate diverse and improved annotations.In this way,annotations are augmented more ingenious than simple manipulations without incurring huge computation for training a data augmentation model.Multiple comparative experiments on three datasets are conducted,including an in-house dataset,ADE20K and COCO2017.On this in-house dataset,namely Agricultural Plot Segmentation Dataset,maximum improvements of 3.77%and 8.92%are gained in two mainstream metrics,mIoU and mAcc,respectively.Consequently,large vision models like SAM are proven to be promising not only in image segmentation but also in data augmentation.
基金The researchers would like to thank the Deanship of Graduate Studies and Scientific Research at Qassim University for financial support(QU-APC-2025).
文摘Deep learning(DL),derived from the domain of Artificial Neural Networks(ANN),forms one of the most essential components of modern deep learning algorithms.DL segmentation models rely on layer-by-layer convolution-based feature representation,guided by forward and backward propagation.Acritical aspect of this process is the selection of an appropriate activation function(AF)to ensure robustmodel learning.However,existing activation functions often fail to effectively address the vanishing gradient problem or are complicated by the need for manual parameter tuning.Most current research on activation function design focuses on classification tasks using natural image datasets such asMNIST,CIFAR-10,and CIFAR-100.To address this gap,this study proposesMed-ReLU,a novel activation function specifically designed for medical image segmentation.Med-ReLU prevents deep learning models fromsuffering dead neurons or vanishing gradient issues.It is a hybrid activation function that combines the properties of ReLU and Softsign.For positive inputs,Med-ReLU adopts the linear behavior of ReLU to avoid vanishing gradients,while for negative inputs,it exhibits the Softsign’s polynomial convergence,ensuring robust training and avoiding inactive neurons across the training set.The training performance and segmentation accuracy ofMed-ReLU have been thoroughly evaluated,demonstrating stable learning behavior and resistance to overfitting.It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art activation functions inmedical image segmentation tasks.Designed as a parameter-free function,Med-ReLU is simple to implement in complex deep learning architectures,and its effectiveness spans various neural network models and anomaly detection scenarios.
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.62001313)the Key Project of Liaoning Provincial Department of Science and Technology(No.2021JH2/10300134,2022JH1/10500004)。
文摘In the realm of medical image segmentation,particularly in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging(MRI),achieving robust performance with limited annotated data is a significant challenge.Performance often degrades when faced with testing scenarios from unknown domains.To address this problem,this paper proposes a novel semi-supervised approach for cardiac magnetic resonance image segmentation,aiming to enhance predictive capabilities and domain generalization(DG).This paper establishes an MT-like model utilizing pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization from semi-supervised learning,and integrates uncertainty estimation to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels.Additionally,to tackle the challenge of domain generalization,a data manipulation strategy is introduced,extracting spatial and content-related information from images across different domains,enriching the dataset with a multi-domain perspective.This papers method is meticulously evaluated on the publicly available cardiac magnetic resonance imaging dataset M&Ms,validating its effectiveness.Comparative analyses against various methods highlight the out-standing performance of this papers approach,demonstrating its capability to segment cardiac magnetic resonance images in previously unseen domains even with limited annotated data.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.62072250,61772281,61702235,U1636117,U1804263,62172435,61872203 and 61802212)the Zhongyuan Science and Technology Innovation Leading Talent Project of China(Grant No.214200510019)+3 种基金the Suqian Municipal Science and Technology Plan Project in 2020(S202015)the Plan for Scientific Talent of Henan Province(Grant No.2018JR0018)the Opening Project of Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology(Grant No.2020B1212060078)the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions(PAPD)Fund.
文摘Medical image segmentation,i.e.,labeling structures of interest in medical images,is crucial for disease diagnosis and treatment in radiology.In reversible data hiding in medical images(RDHMI),segmentation consists of only two regions:the focal and nonfocal regions.The focal region mainly contains information for diagnosis,while the nonfocal region serves as the monochrome background.The current traditional segmentation methods utilized in RDHMI are inaccurate for complex medical images,and manual segmentation is time-consuming,poorly reproducible,and operator-dependent.Implementing state-of-the-art deep learning(DL)models will facilitate key benefits,but the lack of domain-specific labels for existing medical datasets makes it impossible.To address this problem,this study provides labels of existing medical datasets based on a hybrid segmentation approach to facilitate the implementation of DL segmentation models in this domain.First,an initial segmentation based on a 33 kernel is performed to analyze×identified contour pixels before classifying pixels into focal and nonfocal regions.Then,several human expert raters evaluate and classify the generated labels into accurate and inaccurate labels.The inaccurate labels undergo manual segmentation by medical practitioners and are scored based on a hierarchical voting scheme before being assigned to the proposed dataset.To ensure reliability and integrity in the proposed dataset,we evaluate the accurate automated labels with manually segmented labels by medical practitioners using five assessment metrics:dice coefficient,Jaccard index,precision,recall,and accuracy.The experimental results show labels in the proposed dataset are consistent with the subjective judgment of human experts,with an average accuracy score of 94%and dice coefficient scores between 90%-99%.The study further proposes a ResNet-UNet with concatenated spatial and channel squeeze and excitation(scSE)architecture for semantic segmentation to validate and illustrate the usefulness of the proposed dataset.The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed architecture in accurately separating the focal and nonfocal regions compared to state-of-the-art architectures.Dataset information is released under the following URL:https://www.kaggle.com/lordamoah/datasets(accessed on 31 March 2025).
基金supported by the Natural Science Foundation of the Anhui Higher Education Institutions of China(Grant Nos.2023AH040149 and 2024AH051915)the Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation(Grant No.2208085MF168)+1 种基金the Science and Technology Innovation Tackle Plan Project of Maanshan(Grant No.2024RGZN001)the Scientific Research Fund Project of Anhui Medical University(Grant No.2023xkj122).
文摘Convolutional neural networks(CNNs)-based medical image segmentation technologies have been widely used in medical image segmentation because of their strong representation and generalization abilities.However,due to the inability to effectively capture global information from images,CNNs can easily lead to loss of contours and textures in segmentation results.Notice that the transformer model can effectively capture the properties of long-range dependencies in the image,and furthermore,combining the CNN and the transformer can effectively extract local details and global contextual features of the image.Motivated by this,we propose a multi-branch and multi-scale attention network(M2ANet)for medical image segmentation,whose architecture consists of three components.Specifically,in the first component,we construct an adaptive multi-branch patch module for parallel extraction of image features to reduce information loss caused by downsampling.In the second component,we apply residual block to the well-known convolutional block attention module to enhance the network’s ability to recognize important features of images and alleviate the phenomenon of gradient vanishing.In the third component,we design a multi-scale feature fusion module,in which we adopt adaptive average pooling and position encoding to enhance contextual features,and then multi-head attention is introduced to further enrich feature representation.Finally,we validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed M2ANet method through comparative experiments on four benchmark medical image segmentation datasets,particularly in the context of preserving contours and textures.
基金National Key Research and Development Program of China,Grant/Award Number:2018YFE0206900China Postdoctoral Science Foundation,Grant/Award Number:2023M731204+2 种基金The Open Project of Key Laboratory for Quality Evaluation of Ultrasound Surgical Equipment of National Medical Products Administration,Grant/Award Number:SMDTKL-2023-1-01The Hubei Province Key Research and Development Project,Grant/Award Number:2023BCB007CAAI-Huawei MindSpore Open Fund。
文摘Convolutional neural network(CNN)with the encoder-decoder structure is popular in medical image segmentation due to its excellent local feature extraction ability but it faces limitations in capturing the global feature.The transformer can extract the global information well but adapting it to small medical datasets is challenging and its computational complexity can be heavy.In this work,a serial and parallel network is proposed for the accurate 3D medical image segmentation by combining CNN and transformer and promoting feature interactions across various semantic levels.The core components of the proposed method include the cross window self-attention based transformer(CWST)and multi-scale local enhanced(MLE)modules.The CWST module enhances the global context understanding by partitioning 3D images into non-overlapping windows and calculating sparse global attention between windows.The MLE module selectively fuses features by computing the voxel attention between different branch features,and uses convolution to strengthen the dense local information.The experiments on the prostate,atrium,and pancreas MR/CT image datasets consistently demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over six popular segmentation models in both qualitative evaluation and quantitative indexes such as dice similarity coefficient,Intersection over Union,95%Hausdorff distance and average symmetric surface distance.
基金the Innovation Program of Shanghai Industrial Synergy(No.XTCX-KJ-2023-2-12)。
文摘Medical image segmentation is a crucial task in clinical applications.However,obtaining labeled data for medical images is often challenging.This has led to the appeal of semi-supervised learning(SSL),a technique adept at leveraging a modest amount of labeled data.Nonetheless,most prevailing SSL segmentation methods for medical images either rely on the single consistency training method or directly fine-tune SSL methods designed for natural images.In this paper,we propose an innovative semi-supervised method called multi-consistency training(MCT)for medical image segmentation.Our approach transcends the constraints of prior methodologies by considering consistency from a dual perspective:output consistency across different up-sampling methods and output consistency of the same data within the same network under various perturbations to the intermediate features.We design distinct semi-supervised loss regression methods for these two types of consistencies.To enhance the application of our MCT model,we also develop a dedicated decoder as the core of our neural network.Thorough experiments were conducted on the polyp dataset and the dental dataset,rigorously compared against other SSL methods.Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach,achieving higher segmentation accuracy.Moreover,comprehensive ablation studies and insightful discussion substantiate the efficacy of our approach in navigating the intricacies of medical image segmentation.
基金financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program(Grant No.2022YFE0107000)the General Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.52171259)the High-Tech Ship Research Project of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology(Grant No.[2021]342)。
文摘Identification of the ice channel is the basic technology for developing intelligent ships in ice-covered waters,which is important to ensure the safety and economy of navigation.In the Arctic,merchant ships with low ice class often navigate in channels opened up by icebreakers.Navigation in the ice channel often depends on good maneuverability skills and abundant experience from the captain to a large extent.The ship may get stuck if steered into ice fields off the channel.Under this circumstance,it is very important to study how to identify the boundary lines of ice channels with a reliable method.In this paper,a two-staged ice channel identification method is developed based on image segmentation and corner point regression.The first stage employs the image segmentation method to extract channel regions.In the second stage,an intelligent corner regression network is proposed to extract the channel boundary lines from the channel region.A non-intelligent angle-based filtering and clustering method is proposed and compared with corner point regression network.The training and evaluation of the segmentation method and corner regression network are carried out on the synthetic and real ice channel dataset.The evaluation results show that the accuracy of the method using the corner point regression network in the second stage is achieved as high as 73.33%on the synthetic ice channel dataset and 70.66%on the real ice channel dataset,and the processing speed can reach up to 14.58frames per second.
基金partially supported by the NSF grants DMS-1854434,DMS-1952644,DMS-2151235,DMS-2219904,and CAREER 1846690。
文摘In this paper,we design an efficient,multi-stage image segmentation framework that incorporates a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation(AITV).The segmentation framework generally consists of two stages:smoothing and thresholding,thus referred to as smoothing-and-thresholding(SaT).In the first stage,a smoothed image is obtained by an AITV-regularized Mumford-Shah(MS)model,which can be solved efficiently by the alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMMs)with a closed-form solution of a proximal operator of the l_(1)-αl_(2) regularizer.The convergence of the ADMM algorithm is analyzed.In the second stage,we threshold the smoothed image by K-means clustering to obtain the final segmentation result.Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed segmentation framework is versatile for both grayscale and color images,effcient in producing high-quality segmentation results within a few seconds,and robust to input images that are corrupted with noise,blur,or both.We compare the AITV method with its original convex TV and nonconvex TVP(O<p<1)counterparts,showcasing the qualitative and quantitative advantages of our proposed method.
基金funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China(Grant 2020YFB1708900)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(Grant No.B220201044).
文摘Medical image segmentation has witnessed rapid advancements with the emergence of encoder-decoder based methods.In the encoder-decoder structure,the primary goal of the decoding phase is not only to restore feature map resolution,but also to mitigate the loss of feature information incurred during the encoding phase.However,this approach gives rise to a challenge:multiple up-sampling operations in the decoder segment result in the loss of feature information.To address this challenge,we propose a novel network that removes the decoding structure to reduce feature information loss(CBL-Net).In particular,we introduce a Parallel Pooling Module(PPM)to counteract the feature information loss stemming from conventional and pooling operations during the encoding stage.Furthermore,we incorporate a Multiplexed Dilation Convolution(MDC)module to expand the network's receptive field.Also,although we have removed the decoding stage,we still need to recover the feature map resolution.Therefore,we introduced the Global Feature Recovery(GFR)module.It uses attention mechanism for the image feature map resolution recovery,which can effectively reduce the loss of feature information.We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on three publicly available medical image segmentation datasets:DRIVE,CHASEDB and MoNuSeg datasets.Experimental results show that our proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in medical image segmentation.In addition,it achieves higher efficiency than the current network of coding and decoding structures by eliminating the decoding component.
基金supported by the National Key R&D Program of China(2018AAA0102100)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.62376287)+3 种基金the International Science and Technology Innovation Joint Base of Machine Vision and Medical Image Processing in Hunan Province(2021CB1013)the Key Research and Development Program of Hunan Province(2022SK2054)the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province(No.2022JJ30762,2023JJ70016)the 111 Project under Grant(No.B18059).
文摘Automatic segmentation of medical images provides a reliable scientific basis for disease diagnosis and analysis.Notably,most existing methods that combine the strengths of convolutional neural networks(CNNs)and Transformers have made significant progress.However,there are some limitations in the current integration of CNN and Transformer technology in two key aspects.Firstly,most methods either overlook or fail to fully incorporate the complementary nature between local and global features.Secondly,the significance of integrating the multiscale encoder features from the dual-branch network to enhance the decoding features is often disregarded in methods that combine CNN and Transformer.To address this issue,we present a groundbreaking dual-branch cross-attention fusion network(DCFNet),which efficiently combines the power of Swin Transformer and CNN to generate complementary global and local features.We then designed the Feature Cross-Fusion(FCF)module to efficiently fuse local and global features.In the FCF,the utilization of the Channel-wise Cross-fusion Transformer(CCT)serves the purpose of aggregatingmulti-scale features,and the Feature FusionModule(FFM)is employed to effectively aggregate dual-branch prominent feature regions from the spatial perspective.Furthermore,within the decoding phase of the dual-branch network,our proposed Channel Attention Block(CAB)aims to emphasize the significance of the channel features between the up-sampled features and the features generated by the FCFmodule to enhance the details of the decoding.Experimental results demonstrate that DCFNet exhibits enhanced accuracy in segmentation performance.Compared to other state-of-the-art(SOTA)methods,our segmentation framework exhibits a superior level of competitiveness.DCFNet’s accurate segmentation of medical images can greatly assist medical professionals in making crucial diagnoses of lesion areas in advance.
基金This work is supported by Natural Science Foundation of Anhui under Grant 1908085MF207,KJ2020A1215,KJ2021A1251 and 2023AH052856the Excellent Youth Talent Support Foundation of Anhui underGrant gxyqZD2021142the Quality Engineering Project of Anhui under Grant 2021jyxm1117,2021kcszsfkc307,2022xsxx158 and 2022jcbs043.
文摘To enhance the diversity and distribution uniformity of initial population,as well as to avoid local extrema in the Chimp Optimization Algorithm(CHOA),this paper improves the CHOA based on chaos initialization and Cauchy mutation.First,Sin chaos is introduced to improve the random population initialization scheme of the CHOA,which not only guarantees the diversity of the population,but also enhances the distribution uniformity of the initial population.Next,Cauchy mutation is added to optimize the global search ability of the CHOA in the process of position(threshold)updating to avoid the CHOA falling into local optima.Finally,an improved CHOA was formed through the combination of chaos initialization and Cauchy mutation(CICMCHOA),then taking fuzzy Kapur as the objective function,this paper applied CICMCHOA to natural and medical image segmentation,and compared it with four algorithms,including the improved Satin Bowerbird optimizer(ISBO),Cuckoo Search(ICS),etc.The experimental results deriving from visual and specific indicators demonstrate that CICMCHOA delivers superior segmentation effects in image segmentation.
基金sponsored by Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation under Grant No.2021A1515110680Guangzhou Basic and Applied Basic Research under Grant No.202102020340.
文摘In this paper,we consider the Chan–Vese(C-V)model for image segmentation and obtain its numerical solution accurately and efficiently.For this purpose,we present a local radial basis function method based on a Gaussian kernel(GA-LRBF)for spatial discretization.Compared to the standard radial basis functionmethod,this approach consumes less CPU time and maintains good stability because it uses only a small subset of points in the whole computational domain.Additionally,since the Gaussian function has the property of dimensional separation,the GA-LRBF method is suitable for dealing with isotropic images.Finally,a numerical scheme that couples GA-LRBF with the fourth-order Runge–Kutta method is applied to the C-V model,and a comparison of some numerical results demonstrates that this scheme achieves much more reliable image segmentation.