Brain tumors require precise segmentation for diagnosis and treatment plans due to their complex morphology and heterogeneous characteristics.While MRI-based automatic brain tumor segmentation technology reduces the b...Brain tumors require precise segmentation for diagnosis and treatment plans due to their complex morphology and heterogeneous characteristics.While MRI-based automatic brain tumor segmentation technology reduces the burden on medical staff and provides quantitative information,existing methodologies and recent models still struggle to accurately capture and classify the fine boundaries and diverse morphologies of tumors.In order to address these challenges and maximize the performance of brain tumor segmentation,this research introduces a novel SwinUNETR-based model by integrating a new decoder block,the Hierarchical Channel-wise Attention Decoder(HCAD),into a powerful SwinUNETR encoder.The HCAD decoder block utilizes hierarchical features and channelspecific attention mechanisms to further fuse information at different scales transmitted from the encoder and preserve spatial details throughout the reconstruction phase.Rigorous evaluations on the recent BraTS GLI datasets demonstrate that the proposed SwinHCAD model achieved superior and improved segmentation accuracy on both the Dice score and HD95 metrics across all tumor subregions(WT,TC,and ET)compared to baseline models.In particular,the rationale and contribution of the model design were clarified through ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of the proposed HCAD decoder block.The results of this study are expected to greatly contribute to enhancing the efficiency of clinical diagnosis and treatment planning by increasing the precision of automated brain tumor segmentation.展开更多
Lower back pain is one of the most common medical problems in the world and it is experienced by a huge percentage of people everywhere.Due to its ability to produce a detailed view of the soft tissues,including the s...Lower back pain is one of the most common medical problems in the world and it is experienced by a huge percentage of people everywhere.Due to its ability to produce a detailed view of the soft tissues,including the spinal cord,nerves,intervertebral discs,and vertebrae,Magnetic Resonance Imaging is thought to be the most effective method for imaging the spine.The semantic segmentation of vertebrae plays a major role in the diagnostic process of lumbar diseases.It is difficult to semantically partition the vertebrae in Magnetic Resonance Images from the surrounding variety of tissues,including muscles,ligaments,and intervertebral discs.U-Net is a powerful deep-learning architecture to handle the challenges of medical image analysis tasks and achieves high segmentation accuracy.This work proposes a modified U-Net architecture namely MU-Net,consisting of the Meijering convolutional layer that incorporates the Meijering filter to perform the semantic segmentation of lumbar vertebrae L1 to L5 and sacral vertebra S1.Pseudo-colour mask images were generated and used as ground truth for training the model.The work has been carried out on 1312 images expanded from T1-weighted mid-sagittal MRI images of 515 patients in the Lumbar Spine MRI Dataset publicly available from Mendeley Data.The proposed MU-Net model for the semantic segmentation of the lumbar vertebrae gives better performance with 98.79%of pixel accuracy(PA),98.66%of dice similarity coefficient(DSC),97.36%of Jaccard coefficient,and 92.55%mean Intersection over Union(mean IoU)metrics using the mentioned 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
Background:Diabetic retinopathy(DR)is one of the primary causes of visual impairment globally,resulting from microvascular abnormalities in the retina.Accurate segmentation of retinal blood vessels from fundus images ...Background:Diabetic retinopathy(DR)is one of the primary causes of visual impairment globally,resulting from microvascular abnormalities in the retina.Accurate segmentation of retinal blood vessels from fundus images plays a pivotal role in the early diagnosis,progression monitoring,and treatment planning of DR and related ocular conditions.Traditional convolutional neural networks often struggle with capturing the intricate structures of thin vessels under varied illumination and contrast conditions.Methods:In this study,we propose an improved U-Net-based framework named MSAC U-Net,which enhances feature extraction and reconstruction through multiscale and attention-based modules.Specifically,the encoder replaces standard convolutions with a Multiscale Asymmetric Convolution(MSAC)block,incorporating parallel 1×n,n×1,and n×n kernels at different scales(3×3,5×5,7×7)to effectively capture fine-grained vascular structures.To further refine spatial representation,skip connections are utilized,and the decoder is augmented with dual activation strategies,Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks,and Convolutional Block Attention Modules for improved contextual understanding.Results:The model was evaluated on the publicly available DRIVE dataset.It achieved an accuracy of 96.48%,sensitivity of 88.31%,specificity of 97.90%,and an AUC of 98.59%,demonstrating superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art segmentation methods.Conclusion:The proposed MSAC U-Net provides a robust and accurate approach for retinal vessel segmentation,offering substantial clinical value in the early detection and management of diabetic retinopathy.Its design contributes to enhanced segmentation reliability and may serve as a foundation for broader applications in medical image analysis.展开更多
Thyroid nodules,a common disorder in the endocrine system,require accurate segmentation in ultrasound images for effective diagnosis and treatment.However,achieving precise segmentation remains a challenge due to vari...Thyroid nodules,a common disorder in the endocrine system,require accurate segmentation in ultrasound images for effective diagnosis and treatment.However,achieving precise segmentation remains a challenge due to various factors,including scattering noise,low contrast,and limited resolution in ultrasound images.Although existing segmentation models have made progress,they still suffer from several limitations,such as high error rates,low generalizability,overfitting,limited feature learning capability,etc.To address these challenges,this paper proposes a Multi-level Relation Transformer-based U-Net(MLRT-UNet)to improve thyroid nodule segmentation.The MLRTUNet leverages a novel Relation Transformer,which processes images at multiple scales,overcoming the limitations of traditional encoding methods.This transformer integrates both local and global features effectively through selfattention and cross-attention units,capturing intricate relationships within the data.The approach also introduces a Co-operative Transformer Fusion(CTF)module to combine multi-scale features from different encoding layers,enhancing the model’s ability to capture complex patterns in the data.Furthermore,the Relation Transformer block enhances long-distance dependencies during the decoding process,improving segmentation accuracy.Experimental results showthat the MLRT-UNet achieves high segmentation accuracy,reaching 98.2% on the Digital Database Thyroid Image(DDT)dataset,97.8% on the Thyroid Nodule 3493(TG3K)dataset,and 98.2% on the Thyroid Nodule3K(TN3K)dataset.These findings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly enhances the accuracy of thyroid nodule segmentation,addressing the limitations of existing models.展开更多
Brain tumor segmentation from Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRI)supports neurologists and radiologists in analyzing tumors and developing personalized treatment plans,making it a crucial yet challenging task.Supervised m...Brain tumor segmentation from Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRI)supports neurologists and radiologists in analyzing tumors and developing personalized treatment plans,making it a crucial yet challenging task.Supervised models such as 3D U-Net perform well in this domain,but their accuracy significantly improves with appropriate preprocessing.This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of preprocessing in brain tumor segmentation by applying a pre-segmentation step based on the Generalized Gaussian Mixture Model(GGMM)to T1 contrastenhanced MRI scans from the BraTS 2020 dataset.The Expectation-Maximization(EM)algorithm is employed to estimate parameters for four tissue classes,generating a new pre-segmented channel that enhances the training and performance of the 3DU-Net model.The proposed GGMM+3D U-Net framework achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.88 for whole tumor segmentation,outperforming both the standard multiscale 3D U-Net(0.84)and MMU-Net(0.85).It also delivered higher Intersection over Union(IoU)scores compared to models trained without preprocessing or with simpler GMM-based segmentation.These results,supported by qualitative visualizations,suggest that GGMM-based preprocessing should be integrated into brain tumor segmentation pipelines to optimize performance.展开更多
This study presents an advanced method for post-mortem person identification using the segmentation of skeletal structures from chest X-ray images.The proposed approach employs the Attention U-Net architecture,enhance...This study presents an advanced method for post-mortem person identification using the segmentation of skeletal structures from chest X-ray images.The proposed approach employs the Attention U-Net architecture,enhanced with gated attention mechanisms,to refine segmentation by emphasizing spatially relevant anatomical features while suppressing irrelevant details.By isolating skeletal structures which remain stable over time compared to soft tissues,this method leverages bones as reliable biometric markers for identity verification.The model integrates custom-designed encoder and decoder blocks with attention gates,achieving high segmentation precision.To evaluate the impact of architectural choices,we conducted an ablation study comparing Attention U-Net with and without attentionmechanisms,alongside an analysis of data augmentation effects.Training and evaluation were performed on a curated chest X-ray dataset,with segmentation performance measured using Dice score,precision,and loss functions,achieving over 98% precision and 94% Dice score.The extracted bone structures were further processed to derive unique biometric patterns,enabling robust and privacy-preserving person identification.Our findings highlight the effectiveness of attentionmechanisms in improving segmentation accuracy and underscore the potential of chest bonebased biometrics in forensic and medical imaging.This work paves the way for integrating artificial intelligence into real-world forensic workflows,offering a non-invasive and reliable solution for post-mortem identification.展开更多
With the continuous development of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques,there have been effective methods supporting the work of dermatologist in the field of skin cancer detection.However,object si...With the continuous development of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques,there have been effective methods supporting the work of dermatologist in the field of skin cancer detection.However,object significant challenges have been presented in accurately segmenting melanomas in dermoscopic images due to the objects that could interfere human observations,such as bubbles and scales.To address these challenges,we propose a dual U-Net network framework for skin melanoma segmentation.In our proposed architecture,we introduce several innovative components that aim to enhance the performance and capabilities of the traditional U-Net.First,we establish a novel framework that links two simplified U-Nets,enabling more comprehensive information exchange and feature integration throughout the network.Second,after cascading the second U-Net,we introduce a skip connection between the decoder and encoder networks,and incorporate a modified receptive field block(MRFB),which is designed to capture multi-scale spatial information.Third,to further enhance the feature representation capabilities,we add a multi-path convolution block attention module(MCBAM)to the first two layers of the first U-Net encoding,and integrate a new squeeze-and-excitation(SE)mechanism with residual connections in the second U-Net.To illustrate the performance of our proposed model,we conducted comprehensive experiments on widely recognized skin datasets.On the ISIC-2017 dataset,the IoU value of our proposed model increased from 0.6406 to 0.6819 and the Dice coefficient increased from 0.7625 to 0.8023.On the ISIC-2018 dataset,the IoU value of proposed model also improved from 0.7138 to 0.7709,while the Dice coefficient increased from 0.8285 to 0.8665.Furthermore,the generalization experiments conducted on the jaw cyst dataset from Quzhou People’s Hospital further verified the outstanding segmentation performance of the proposed model.These findings collectively affirm the potential of our approach as a valuable tool in supporting clinical decision-making in the field of skin cancer detection,as well as advancing research in medical image analysis.展开更多
Accurate and efficient brain tumor segmentation is essential for early diagnosis,treatment planning,and clinical decision-making.However,the complex structure of brain anatomy and the heterogeneous nature of tumors pr...Accurate and efficient brain tumor segmentation is essential for early diagnosis,treatment planning,and clinical decision-making.However,the complex structure of brain anatomy and the heterogeneous nature of tumors present significant challenges for precise anomaly detection.While U-Net-based architectures have demonstrated strong performance in medical image segmentation,there remains room for improvement in feature extraction and localization accuracy.In this study,we propose a novel hybrid model designed to enhance 3D brain tumor segmentation.The architecture incorporates a 3D ResNet encoder known for mitigating the vanishing gradient problem and a 3D U-Net decoder.Additionally,to enhance the model’s generalization ability,Squeeze and Excitation attention mechanism is integrated.We introduce Gabor filter banks into the encoder to further strengthen the model’s ability to extract robust and transformation-invariant features from the complex and irregular shapes typical in medical imaging.This approach,which is not well explored in current U-Net-based segmentation frameworks,provides a unique advantage by enhancing texture-aware feature representation.Specifically,Gabor filters help extract distinctive low-level texture features,reducing the effects of texture interference and facilitating faster convergence during the early stages of training.Our model achieved Dice scores of 0.881,0.846,and 0.819 for Whole Tumor(WT),Tumor Core(TC),and Enhancing Tumor(ET),respectively,on the BraTS 2020 dataset.Cross-validation on the BraTS 2021 dataset further confirmed the model’s robustness,yielding Dice score values of 0.887 for WT,0.856 for TC,and 0.824 for ET.The proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art existing models,particularly in accurately identifying small and complex tumor regions.Extensive evaluations suggest integrating advanced preprocessing with an attention-augmented hybrid architecture offers significant potential for reliable and clinically valuable brain tumor segmentation.展开更多
Ore image segmentation is a key step in an ore grain size analysis based on image processing.The traditional segmentation methods do not deal with ore textures and shadows in ore images well Those methods often suffer...Ore image segmentation is a key step in an ore grain size analysis based on image processing.The traditional segmentation methods do not deal with ore textures and shadows in ore images well Those methods often suffer from under-segmentation and over-segmentation.In this article,in order to solve the problem,an ore image segmentation method based on U-Net is proposed.We adjust the structure of U-Net to speed up the processing,and we modify the loss function to enhance the generalization of the model.After the collection of the ore image,we design the annotation standard and train the network with the annotated image.Finally,the marked watershed algorithm is used to segment the adhesion area.The experimental results show that the proposed method has the characteristics of fast speed,strong robustness and high precision.It has great practical value to the actual ore grain statistical task.展开更多
The main task of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) automatic brain tumor segmentation is to automaticallysegment the brain tumor edema, peritumoral edema, endoscopic core, enhancing tumor core and nonenhancingtumor cor...The main task of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) automatic brain tumor segmentation is to automaticallysegment the brain tumor edema, peritumoral edema, endoscopic core, enhancing tumor core and nonenhancingtumor core from 3D MR images. Because the location, size, shape and intensity of brain tumors vary greatly, itis very difficult to segment these brain tumor regions automatically. In this paper, by combining the advantagesof DenseNet and ResNet, we proposed a new 3D U-Net with dense encoder blocks and residual decoder blocks.We used dense blocks in the encoder part and residual blocks in the decoder part. The number of output featuremaps increases with the network layers in contracting path of encoder, which is consistent with the characteristicsof dense blocks. Using dense blocks can decrease the number of network parameters, deepen network layers,strengthen feature propagation, alleviate vanishing-gradient and enlarge receptive fields. The residual blockswere used in the decoder to replace the convolution neural block of original U-Net, which made the networkperformance better. Our proposed approach was trained and validated on the BraTS2019 training and validationdata set. We obtained dice scores of 0.901, 0.815 and 0.766 for whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumorcore respectively on the BraTS2019 validation data set. Our method has the better performance than the original3D U-Net. The results of our experiment demonstrate that compared with some state-of-the-art methods, ourapproach is a competitive automatic brain tumor segmentation method.展开更多
As a mainstream research direction in the field of image segmentation,medical image segmentation plays a key role in the quantification of lesions,three-dimensional reconstruction,region of interest extraction and so ...As a mainstream research direction in the field of image segmentation,medical image segmentation plays a key role in the quantification of lesions,three-dimensional reconstruction,region of interest extraction and so on.Compared with natural images,medical images have a variety of modes.Besides,the emphasis of information which is conveyed by images of different modes is quite different.Because it is time-consuming and inefficient to manually segment medical images only by professional and experienced doctors.Therefore,large quantities of automated medical image segmentation methods have been developed.However,until now,researchers have not developed a universal method for all types of medical image segmentation.This paper reviews the literature on segmentation techniques that have produced major breakthroughs in recent years.Among the large quantities of medical image segmentation methods,this paper mainly discusses two categories of medical image segmentation methods.One is the improved strategies based on traditional clustering method.The other is the research progress of the improved image segmentation network structure model based on U-Net.The power of technology proves that the performance of the deep learning-based method is significantly better than that of the traditional method.This paper discussed both advantages and disadvantages of different algorithms and detailed how these methods can be used for the segmentation of lesions or other organs and tissues,as well as possible technical trends for future work.展开更多
Aiming at the problem that the existing models have a poor segmentation effect on imbalanced data sets with small-scale samples,a bilateral U-Net network model with a spatial attention mechanism is designed.The model ...Aiming at the problem that the existing models have a poor segmentation effect on imbalanced data sets with small-scale samples,a bilateral U-Net network model with a spatial attention mechanism is designed.The model uses the lightweight MobileNetV2 as the backbone network for feature hierarchical extraction and proposes an Attentive Pyramid Spatial Attention(APSA)module compared to the Attenuated Spatial Pyramid module,which can increase the receptive field and enhance the information,and finally adds the context fusion prediction branch that fuses high-semantic and low-semantic prediction results,and the model effectively improves the segmentation accuracy of small data sets.The experimental results on the CamVid data set show that compared with some existing semantic segmentation networks,the algorithm has a better segmentation effect and segmentation accuracy,and its mIOU reaches 75.85%.Moreover,to verify the generality of the model and the effectiveness of the APSA module,experiments were conducted on the VOC 2012 data set,and the APSA module improved mIOU by about 12.2%.展开更多
Medical image segmentation plays an important role in clinical diagnosis,quantitative analysis,and treatment process.Since 2015,U-Net-based approaches have been widely used formedical image segmentation.The purpose of...Medical image segmentation plays an important role in clinical diagnosis,quantitative analysis,and treatment process.Since 2015,U-Net-based approaches have been widely used formedical image segmentation.The purpose of the U-Net expansive path is to map low-resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps.However,the consecutive deconvolution and convolutional operations in the expansive path lead to the loss of some high-level information.More high-level information can make the segmentationmore accurate.In this paper,we propose MU-Net,a novel,multi-path upsampling convolution network to retain more high-level information.The MU-Net mainly consists of three parts:contracting path,skip connection,and multi-expansive paths.The proposed MU-Net architecture is evaluated based on three different medical imaging datasets.Our experiments show that MU-Net improves the segmentation performance of U-Net-based methods on different datasets.At the same time,the computational efficiency is significantly improved by reducing the number of parameters by more than half.展开更多
In the study of the composite materials performance,X-ray computed tomography(XCT)scanning has always been one of the important measures to detect the internal structures.CT image segmentation technology will effectiv...In the study of the composite materials performance,X-ray computed tomography(XCT)scanning has always been one of the important measures to detect the internal structures.CT image segmentation technology will effectively improve the accuracy of the subsequent material feature extraction process,which is of great significance to the study of material performance.This study focuses on the low accuracy problem of image segmentation caused by fiber cross-section adhesion in composite CT images.In the core layer area,area validity is evaluated by morphological indicator and an iterative segmentation strategy is proposed based on the watershed algorithm.In the transition layer area,a U-net neural network model trained by using artificial labels is applied to the prediction of segmentation result.Furthermore,a CT image segmentation method for fiber composite materials based on the improved watershed algorithm and the U-net model is proposed.It is verified by experiments that the method has good adaptability and effectiveness to the CT image segmentation problem of composite materials,and the accuracy of segmentation is significantly improved in comparison with the original method,which ensures the accuracy and robustness of the subsequent fiber feature extraction process.展开更多
With the widespread application of deep learning in the field of computer vision,gradually allowing medical image technology to assist doctors in making diagnoses has great practical and research significance.Aiming a...With the widespread application of deep learning in the field of computer vision,gradually allowing medical image technology to assist doctors in making diagnoses has great practical and research significance.Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional U-Net model in 3D spatial information extraction,model over-fitting,and low degree of semantic information fusion,an improved medical image segmentation model has been used to achieve more accurate segmentation of medical images.In this model,we make full use of the residual network(ResNet)to solve the over-fitting problem.In order to process and aggregate data at different scales,the inception network is used instead of the traditional convolutional layer,and the dilated convolution is used to increase the receptive field.The conditional random field(CRF)can complete the contour refinement work.Compared with the traditional 3D U-Net network,the segmentation accuracy of the improved liver and tumor images increases by 2.89%and 7.66%,respectively.As a part of the image processing process,the method in this paper not only can be used for medical image segmentation,but also can lay the foundation for subsequent image 3D reconstruction work.展开更多
Background Magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)has played an important role in the rapid growth of medical imaging diagnostic technology,especially in the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors owing to its non invasive c...Background Magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)has played an important role in the rapid growth of medical imaging diagnostic technology,especially in the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors owing to its non invasive characteristics and superior soft tissue contrast.However,brain tumors are characterized by high non uniformity and non-obvious boundaries in MRI images because of their invasive and highly heterogeneous nature.In addition,the labeling of tumor areas is time-consuming and laborious.Methods To address these issues,this study uses a residual grouped convolution module,convolutional block attention module,and bilinear interpolation upsampling method to improve the classical segmentation network U-net.The influence of network normalization,loss function,and network depth on segmentation performance is further considered.Results In the experiments,the Dice score of the proposed segmentation model reached 97.581%,which is 12.438%higher than that of traditional U-net,demonstrating the effective segmentation of MRI brain tumor images.Conclusions In conclusion,we use the improved U-net network to achieve a good segmentation effect of brain tumor MRI images.展开更多
Automatic segmentation of early esophagus cancer(EEC)in gastrointestinal endoscopy(GIE)images is a critical and challenging task in clinical settings,which relies primarily on labor-intensive and time-consuming routin...Automatic segmentation of early esophagus cancer(EEC)in gastrointestinal endoscopy(GIE)images is a critical and challenging task in clinical settings,which relies primarily on labor-intensive and time-consuming routines.EEC has often been diagnosed at the late stage since early signs of cancer are not obvious,resulting in low survival rates.This work proposes a deep learning approach based on the U-Net++method to segment EEC in GIE images.A total of 2690 GIE images collected from 617 patients at the Digestive Endoscopy Center,West China Hospital of Sichuan University,China,have been utilized.The experimental result shows that our proposed method achieved promising results.Furthermore,the comparison has been made between the proposed and other U-Net-related methods using the same dataset.The mean and standard deviation(SD)of the dice similarity coefficient(DSC),intersection over union(IoU),precision(Pre),and recall(Rec)achieved by the proposed framework were DSC(%)=94.62±0.02,IoU(%)=90.99±0.04,Pre(%)=94.61±0.04,and Rec(%)=95.00±0.02,respectively,outperforming the others.The proposed method has the potential to be applied in EEC automatic diagnoses.展开更多
Nuclei segmentation is a challenging task in histopathology images.It is challenging due to the small size of objects,low contrast,touching boundaries,and complex structure of nuclei.Their segmentation and counting pl...Nuclei segmentation is a challenging task in histopathology images.It is challenging due to the small size of objects,low contrast,touching boundaries,and complex structure of nuclei.Their segmentation and counting play an important role in cancer identification and its grading.In this study,WaveSeg-UNet,a lightweight model,is introduced to segment cancerous nuclei having touching boundaries.Residual blocks are used for feature extraction.Only one feature extractor block is used in each level of the encoder and decoder.Normally,images degrade quality and lose important information during down-sampling.To overcome this loss,discrete wavelet transform(DWT)alongside maxpooling is used in the down-sampling process.Inverse DWT is used to regenerate original images during up-sampling.In the bottleneck of the proposed model,atrous spatial channel pyramid pooling(ASCPP)is used to extract effective high-level features.The ASCPP is the modified pyramid pooling having atrous layers to increase the area of the receptive field.Spatial and channel-based attention are used to focus on the location and class of the identified objects.Finally,watershed transform is used as a post processing technique to identify and refine touching boundaries of nuclei.Nuclei are identified and counted to facilitate pathologists.The same domain of transfer learning is used to retrain the model for domain adaptability.Results of the proposed model are compared with state-of-the-art models,and it outperformed the existing studies.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
基金supported by Institute of Information&Communications Technology Planning&Evaluation(IITP)under the Metaverse Support Program to Nurture the Best Talents(IITP-2024-RS-2023-00254529)grant funded by the Korea government(MSIT).
文摘Brain tumors require precise segmentation for diagnosis and treatment plans due to their complex morphology and heterogeneous characteristics.While MRI-based automatic brain tumor segmentation technology reduces the burden on medical staff and provides quantitative information,existing methodologies and recent models still struggle to accurately capture and classify the fine boundaries and diverse morphologies of tumors.In order to address these challenges and maximize the performance of brain tumor segmentation,this research introduces a novel SwinUNETR-based model by integrating a new decoder block,the Hierarchical Channel-wise Attention Decoder(HCAD),into a powerful SwinUNETR encoder.The HCAD decoder block utilizes hierarchical features and channelspecific attention mechanisms to further fuse information at different scales transmitted from the encoder and preserve spatial details throughout the reconstruction phase.Rigorous evaluations on the recent BraTS GLI datasets demonstrate that the proposed SwinHCAD model achieved superior and improved segmentation accuracy on both the Dice score and HD95 metrics across all tumor subregions(WT,TC,and ET)compared to baseline models.In particular,the rationale and contribution of the model design were clarified through ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of the proposed HCAD decoder block.The results of this study are expected to greatly contribute to enhancing the efficiency of clinical diagnosis and treatment planning by increasing the precision of automated brain tumor segmentation.
文摘Lower back pain is one of the most common medical problems in the world and it is experienced by a huge percentage of people everywhere.Due to its ability to produce a detailed view of the soft tissues,including the spinal cord,nerves,intervertebral discs,and vertebrae,Magnetic Resonance Imaging is thought to be the most effective method for imaging the spine.The semantic segmentation of vertebrae plays a major role in the diagnostic process of lumbar diseases.It is difficult to semantically partition the vertebrae in Magnetic Resonance Images from the surrounding variety of tissues,including muscles,ligaments,and intervertebral discs.U-Net is a powerful deep-learning architecture to handle the challenges of medical image analysis tasks and achieves high segmentation accuracy.This work proposes a modified U-Net architecture namely MU-Net,consisting of the Meijering convolutional layer that incorporates the Meijering filter to perform the semantic segmentation of lumbar vertebrae L1 to L5 and sacral vertebra S1.Pseudo-colour mask images were generated and used as ground truth for training the model.The work has been carried out on 1312 images expanded from T1-weighted mid-sagittal MRI images of 515 patients in the Lumbar Spine MRI Dataset publicly available from Mendeley Data.The proposed MU-Net model for the semantic segmentation of the lumbar vertebrae gives better performance with 98.79%of pixel accuracy(PA),98.66%of dice similarity coefficient(DSC),97.36%of Jaccard coefficient,and 92.55%mean Intersection over Union(mean IoU)metrics using the mentioned 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supported by the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation(2024A1515010987)the Medical Scientific Research Foundation of Guangdong Province(B2024035).
文摘Background:Diabetic retinopathy(DR)is one of the primary causes of visual impairment globally,resulting from microvascular abnormalities in the retina.Accurate segmentation of retinal blood vessels from fundus images plays a pivotal role in the early diagnosis,progression monitoring,and treatment planning of DR and related ocular conditions.Traditional convolutional neural networks often struggle with capturing the intricate structures of thin vessels under varied illumination and contrast conditions.Methods:In this study,we propose an improved U-Net-based framework named MSAC U-Net,which enhances feature extraction and reconstruction through multiscale and attention-based modules.Specifically,the encoder replaces standard convolutions with a Multiscale Asymmetric Convolution(MSAC)block,incorporating parallel 1×n,n×1,and n×n kernels at different scales(3×3,5×5,7×7)to effectively capture fine-grained vascular structures.To further refine spatial representation,skip connections are utilized,and the decoder is augmented with dual activation strategies,Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks,and Convolutional Block Attention Modules for improved contextual understanding.Results:The model was evaluated on the publicly available DRIVE dataset.It achieved an accuracy of 96.48%,sensitivity of 88.31%,specificity of 97.90%,and an AUC of 98.59%,demonstrating superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art segmentation methods.Conclusion:The proposed MSAC U-Net provides a robust and accurate approach for retinal vessel segmentation,offering substantial clinical value in the early detection and management of diabetic retinopathy.Its design contributes to enhanced segmentation reliability and may serve as a foundation for broader applications in medical image analysis.
文摘Thyroid nodules,a common disorder in the endocrine system,require accurate segmentation in ultrasound images for effective diagnosis and treatment.However,achieving precise segmentation remains a challenge due to various factors,including scattering noise,low contrast,and limited resolution in ultrasound images.Although existing segmentation models have made progress,they still suffer from several limitations,such as high error rates,low generalizability,overfitting,limited feature learning capability,etc.To address these challenges,this paper proposes a Multi-level Relation Transformer-based U-Net(MLRT-UNet)to improve thyroid nodule segmentation.The MLRTUNet leverages a novel Relation Transformer,which processes images at multiple scales,overcoming the limitations of traditional encoding methods.This transformer integrates both local and global features effectively through selfattention and cross-attention units,capturing intricate relationships within the data.The approach also introduces a Co-operative Transformer Fusion(CTF)module to combine multi-scale features from different encoding layers,enhancing the model’s ability to capture complex patterns in the data.Furthermore,the Relation Transformer block enhances long-distance dependencies during the decoding process,improving segmentation accuracy.Experimental results showthat the MLRT-UNet achieves high segmentation accuracy,reaching 98.2% on the Digital Database Thyroid Image(DDT)dataset,97.8% on the Thyroid Nodule 3493(TG3K)dataset,and 98.2% on the Thyroid Nodule3K(TN3K)dataset.These findings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly enhances the accuracy of thyroid nodule segmentation,addressing the limitations of existing models.
基金Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University Researchers Supporting Project number(PNURSP2025R826),Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University,Riyadh,Saudi ArabiaNorthern Border University,Saudi Arabia,for supporting this work through project number(NBU-CRP-2025-2933).
文摘Brain tumor segmentation from Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRI)supports neurologists and radiologists in analyzing tumors and developing personalized treatment plans,making it a crucial yet challenging task.Supervised models such as 3D U-Net perform well in this domain,but their accuracy significantly improves with appropriate preprocessing.This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of preprocessing in brain tumor segmentation by applying a pre-segmentation step based on the Generalized Gaussian Mixture Model(GGMM)to T1 contrastenhanced MRI scans from the BraTS 2020 dataset.The Expectation-Maximization(EM)algorithm is employed to estimate parameters for four tissue classes,generating a new pre-segmented channel that enhances the training and performance of the 3DU-Net model.The proposed GGMM+3D U-Net framework achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.88 for whole tumor segmentation,outperforming both the standard multiscale 3D U-Net(0.84)and MMU-Net(0.85).It also delivered higher Intersection over Union(IoU)scores compared to models trained without preprocessing or with simpler GMM-based segmentation.These results,supported by qualitative visualizations,suggest that GGMM-based preprocessing should be integrated into brain tumor segmentation pipelines to optimize performance.
基金funded by Umm Al-Qura University,Saudi Arabia under grant number:25UQU4300346GSSR08.
文摘This study presents an advanced method for post-mortem person identification using the segmentation of skeletal structures from chest X-ray images.The proposed approach employs the Attention U-Net architecture,enhanced with gated attention mechanisms,to refine segmentation by emphasizing spatially relevant anatomical features while suppressing irrelevant details.By isolating skeletal structures which remain stable over time compared to soft tissues,this method leverages bones as reliable biometric markers for identity verification.The model integrates custom-designed encoder and decoder blocks with attention gates,achieving high segmentation precision.To evaluate the impact of architectural choices,we conducted an ablation study comparing Attention U-Net with and without attentionmechanisms,alongside an analysis of data augmentation effects.Training and evaluation were performed on a curated chest X-ray dataset,with segmentation performance measured using Dice score,precision,and loss functions,achieving over 98% precision and 94% Dice score.The extracted bone structures were further processed to derive unique biometric patterns,enabling robust and privacy-preserving person identification.Our findings highlight the effectiveness of attentionmechanisms in improving segmentation accuracy and underscore the potential of chest bonebased biometrics in forensic and medical imaging.This work paves the way for integrating artificial intelligence into real-world forensic workflows,offering a non-invasive and reliable solution for post-mortem identification.
基金funded by Zhejiang Basic Public Welfare Research Project,grant number LZY24E060001supported by Guangzhou Development Zone Science and Technology(2021GH10,2020GH10,2023GH02)+1 种基金the University of Macao(MYRG2022-00271-FST)the Science and Technology Development Fund(FDCT)of Macao(0032/2022/A).
文摘With the continuous development of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques,there have been effective methods supporting the work of dermatologist in the field of skin cancer detection.However,object significant challenges have been presented in accurately segmenting melanomas in dermoscopic images due to the objects that could interfere human observations,such as bubbles and scales.To address these challenges,we propose a dual U-Net network framework for skin melanoma segmentation.In our proposed architecture,we introduce several innovative components that aim to enhance the performance and capabilities of the traditional U-Net.First,we establish a novel framework that links two simplified U-Nets,enabling more comprehensive information exchange and feature integration throughout the network.Second,after cascading the second U-Net,we introduce a skip connection between the decoder and encoder networks,and incorporate a modified receptive field block(MRFB),which is designed to capture multi-scale spatial information.Third,to further enhance the feature representation capabilities,we add a multi-path convolution block attention module(MCBAM)to the first two layers of the first U-Net encoding,and integrate a new squeeze-and-excitation(SE)mechanism with residual connections in the second U-Net.To illustrate the performance of our proposed model,we conducted comprehensive experiments on widely recognized skin datasets.On the ISIC-2017 dataset,the IoU value of our proposed model increased from 0.6406 to 0.6819 and the Dice coefficient increased from 0.7625 to 0.8023.On the ISIC-2018 dataset,the IoU value of proposed model also improved from 0.7138 to 0.7709,while the Dice coefficient increased from 0.8285 to 0.8665.Furthermore,the generalization experiments conducted on the jaw cyst dataset from Quzhou People’s Hospital further verified the outstanding segmentation performance of the proposed model.These findings collectively affirm the potential of our approach as a valuable tool in supporting clinical decision-making in the field of skin cancer detection,as well as advancing research in medical image analysis.
基金the National Science and Technology Council(NSTC)of the Republic of China,Taiwan,for financially supporting this research under Contract No.NSTC 112-2637-M-131-001.
文摘Accurate and efficient brain tumor segmentation is essential for early diagnosis,treatment planning,and clinical decision-making.However,the complex structure of brain anatomy and the heterogeneous nature of tumors present significant challenges for precise anomaly detection.While U-Net-based architectures have demonstrated strong performance in medical image segmentation,there remains room for improvement in feature extraction and localization accuracy.In this study,we propose a novel hybrid model designed to enhance 3D brain tumor segmentation.The architecture incorporates a 3D ResNet encoder known for mitigating the vanishing gradient problem and a 3D U-Net decoder.Additionally,to enhance the model’s generalization ability,Squeeze and Excitation attention mechanism is integrated.We introduce Gabor filter banks into the encoder to further strengthen the model’s ability to extract robust and transformation-invariant features from the complex and irregular shapes typical in medical imaging.This approach,which is not well explored in current U-Net-based segmentation frameworks,provides a unique advantage by enhancing texture-aware feature representation.Specifically,Gabor filters help extract distinctive low-level texture features,reducing the effects of texture interference and facilitating faster convergence during the early stages of training.Our model achieved Dice scores of 0.881,0.846,and 0.819 for Whole Tumor(WT),Tumor Core(TC),and Enhancing Tumor(ET),respectively,on the BraTS 2020 dataset.Cross-validation on the BraTS 2021 dataset further confirmed the model’s robustness,yielding Dice score values of 0.887 for WT,0.856 for TC,and 0.824 for ET.The proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art existing models,particularly in accurately identifying small and complex tumor regions.Extensive evaluations suggest integrating advanced preprocessing with an attention-augmented hybrid architecture offers significant potential for reliable and clinically valuable brain tumor segmentation.
基金This work was supported by The National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant 61801019).
文摘Ore image segmentation is a key step in an ore grain size analysis based on image processing.The traditional segmentation methods do not deal with ore textures and shadows in ore images well Those methods often suffer from under-segmentation and over-segmentation.In this article,in order to solve the problem,an ore image segmentation method based on U-Net is proposed.We adjust the structure of U-Net to speed up the processing,and we modify the loss function to enhance the generalization of the model.After the collection of the ore image,we design the annotation standard and train the network with the annotated image.Finally,the marked watershed algorithm is used to segment the adhesion area.The experimental results show that the proposed method has the characteristics of fast speed,strong robustness and high precision.It has great practical value to the actual ore grain statistical task.
基金This was supported partially by Sichuan Science and Technology Program under Grants 2019YJ0356,21ZDYF2484,21GJHZ0061Scientific Research Foundation of Education Department of Sichuan Province under Grant 18ZB0117.
文摘The main task of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) automatic brain tumor segmentation is to automaticallysegment the brain tumor edema, peritumoral edema, endoscopic core, enhancing tumor core and nonenhancingtumor core from 3D MR images. Because the location, size, shape and intensity of brain tumors vary greatly, itis very difficult to segment these brain tumor regions automatically. In this paper, by combining the advantagesof DenseNet and ResNet, we proposed a new 3D U-Net with dense encoder blocks and residual decoder blocks.We used dense blocks in the encoder part and residual blocks in the decoder part. The number of output featuremaps increases with the network layers in contracting path of encoder, which is consistent with the characteristicsof dense blocks. Using dense blocks can decrease the number of network parameters, deepen network layers,strengthen feature propagation, alleviate vanishing-gradient and enlarge receptive fields. The residual blockswere used in the decoder to replace the convolution neural block of original U-Net, which made the networkperformance better. Our proposed approach was trained and validated on the BraTS2019 training and validationdata set. We obtained dice scores of 0.901, 0.815 and 0.766 for whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumorcore respectively on the BraTS2019 validation data set. Our method has the better performance than the original3D U-Net. The results of our experiment demonstrate that compared with some state-of-the-art methods, ourapproach is a competitive automatic brain tumor segmentation method.
基金supported partly by the Open Project of State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Wave under Grant K202218partly by Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program of College Students under Grants 202210700006Y and 202210700005Z.
文摘As a mainstream research direction in the field of image segmentation,medical image segmentation plays a key role in the quantification of lesions,three-dimensional reconstruction,region of interest extraction and so on.Compared with natural images,medical images have a variety of modes.Besides,the emphasis of information which is conveyed by images of different modes is quite different.Because it is time-consuming and inefficient to manually segment medical images only by professional and experienced doctors.Therefore,large quantities of automated medical image segmentation methods have been developed.However,until now,researchers have not developed a universal method for all types of medical image segmentation.This paper reviews the literature on segmentation techniques that have produced major breakthroughs in recent years.Among the large quantities of medical image segmentation methods,this paper mainly discusses two categories of medical image segmentation methods.One is the improved strategies based on traditional clustering method.The other is the research progress of the improved image segmentation network structure model based on U-Net.The power of technology proves that the performance of the deep learning-based method is significantly better than that of the traditional method.This paper discussed both advantages and disadvantages of different algorithms and detailed how these methods can be used for the segmentation of lesions or other organs and tissues,as well as possible technical trends for future work.
基金Ministry of Science and Technology Basic Resources Survey Special Project,Grant/Award Number:2019FY100900High-level Hospital Construction Project,Grant/Award Number:DFJH2019015+2 种基金National Natural Science Foundation of China,Grant/Award Number:61871021Guangdong Natural Science Foundation,Grant/Award Number:2019A1515011676Beijing Key Laboratory of Robotics Bionic and Functional Research。
文摘Aiming at the problem that the existing models have a poor segmentation effect on imbalanced data sets with small-scale samples,a bilateral U-Net network model with a spatial attention mechanism is designed.The model uses the lightweight MobileNetV2 as the backbone network for feature hierarchical extraction and proposes an Attentive Pyramid Spatial Attention(APSA)module compared to the Attenuated Spatial Pyramid module,which can increase the receptive field and enhance the information,and finally adds the context fusion prediction branch that fuses high-semantic and low-semantic prediction results,and the model effectively improves the segmentation accuracy of small data sets.The experimental results on the CamVid data set show that compared with some existing semantic segmentation networks,the algorithm has a better segmentation effect and segmentation accuracy,and its mIOU reaches 75.85%.Moreover,to verify the generality of the model and the effectiveness of the APSA module,experiments were conducted on the VOC 2012 data set,and the APSA module improved mIOU by about 12.2%.
基金The authors received Sichuan Science and Technology Program(No.18YYJC1917)funding for this study.
文摘Medical image segmentation plays an important role in clinical diagnosis,quantitative analysis,and treatment process.Since 2015,U-Net-based approaches have been widely used formedical image segmentation.The purpose of the U-Net expansive path is to map low-resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps.However,the consecutive deconvolution and convolutional operations in the expansive path lead to the loss of some high-level information.More high-level information can make the segmentationmore accurate.In this paper,we propose MU-Net,a novel,multi-path upsampling convolution network to retain more high-level information.The MU-Net mainly consists of three parts:contracting path,skip connection,and multi-expansive paths.The proposed MU-Net architecture is evaluated based on three different medical imaging datasets.Our experiments show that MU-Net improves the segmentation performance of U-Net-based methods on different datasets.At the same time,the computational efficiency is significantly improved by reducing the number of parameters by more than half.
文摘In the study of the composite materials performance,X-ray computed tomography(XCT)scanning has always been one of the important measures to detect the internal structures.CT image segmentation technology will effectively improve the accuracy of the subsequent material feature extraction process,which is of great significance to the study of material performance.This study focuses on the low accuracy problem of image segmentation caused by fiber cross-section adhesion in composite CT images.In the core layer area,area validity is evaluated by morphological indicator and an iterative segmentation strategy is proposed based on the watershed algorithm.In the transition layer area,a U-net neural network model trained by using artificial labels is applied to the prediction of segmentation result.Furthermore,a CT image segmentation method for fiber composite materials based on the improved watershed algorithm and the U-net model is proposed.It is verified by experiments that the method has good adaptability and effectiveness to the CT image segmentation problem of composite materials,and the accuracy of segmentation is significantly improved in comparison with the original method,which ensures the accuracy and robustness of the subsequent fiber feature extraction process.
文摘With the widespread application of deep learning in the field of computer vision,gradually allowing medical image technology to assist doctors in making diagnoses has great practical and research significance.Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional U-Net model in 3D spatial information extraction,model over-fitting,and low degree of semantic information fusion,an improved medical image segmentation model has been used to achieve more accurate segmentation of medical images.In this model,we make full use of the residual network(ResNet)to solve the over-fitting problem.In order to process and aggregate data at different scales,the inception network is used instead of the traditional convolutional layer,and the dilated convolution is used to increase the receptive field.The conditional random field(CRF)can complete the contour refinement work.Compared with the traditional 3D U-Net network,the segmentation accuracy of the improved liver and tumor images increases by 2.89%and 7.66%,respectively.As a part of the image processing process,the method in this paper not only can be used for medical image segmentation,but also can lay the foundation for subsequent image 3D reconstruction work.
基金Research Fund of Macao Polytechnic University(RP/FCSD-01/2022).
文摘Background Magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)has played an important role in the rapid growth of medical imaging diagnostic technology,especially in the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors owing to its non invasive characteristics and superior soft tissue contrast.However,brain tumors are characterized by high non uniformity and non-obvious boundaries in MRI images because of their invasive and highly heterogeneous nature.In addition,the labeling of tumor areas is time-consuming and laborious.Methods To address these issues,this study uses a residual grouped convolution module,convolutional block attention module,and bilinear interpolation upsampling method to improve the classical segmentation network U-net.The influence of network normalization,loss function,and network depth on segmentation performance is further considered.Results In the experiments,the Dice score of the proposed segmentation model reached 97.581%,which is 12.438%higher than that of traditional U-net,demonstrating the effective segmentation of MRI brain tumor images.Conclusions In conclusion,we use the improved U-net network to achieve a good segmentation effect of brain tumor MRI images.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation under Grants No.62271127,No.61872405,and No.81171411Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province,China under Grant No.23NSFSC0627Medico-Engineering Cooperation Funds from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and West China Hospital of Sichuan University under Grants No.ZYGX2022YGRH011 and No.HXDZ22005.
文摘Automatic segmentation of early esophagus cancer(EEC)in gastrointestinal endoscopy(GIE)images is a critical and challenging task in clinical settings,which relies primarily on labor-intensive and time-consuming routines.EEC has often been diagnosed at the late stage since early signs of cancer are not obvious,resulting in low survival rates.This work proposes a deep learning approach based on the U-Net++method to segment EEC in GIE images.A total of 2690 GIE images collected from 617 patients at the Digestive Endoscopy Center,West China Hospital of Sichuan University,China,have been utilized.The experimental result shows that our proposed method achieved promising results.Furthermore,the comparison has been made between the proposed and other U-Net-related methods using the same dataset.The mean and standard deviation(SD)of the dice similarity coefficient(DSC),intersection over union(IoU),precision(Pre),and recall(Rec)achieved by the proposed framework were DSC(%)=94.62±0.02,IoU(%)=90.99±0.04,Pre(%)=94.61±0.04,and Rec(%)=95.00±0.02,respectively,outperforming the others.The proposed method has the potential to be applied in EEC automatic diagnoses.
文摘Nuclei segmentation is a challenging task in histopathology images.It is challenging due to the small size of objects,low contrast,touching boundaries,and complex structure of nuclei.Their segmentation and counting play an important role in cancer identification and its grading.In this study,WaveSeg-UNet,a lightweight model,is introduced to segment cancerous nuclei having touching boundaries.Residual blocks are used for feature extraction.Only one feature extractor block is used in each level of the encoder and decoder.Normally,images degrade quality and lose important information during down-sampling.To overcome this loss,discrete wavelet transform(DWT)alongside maxpooling is used in the down-sampling process.Inverse DWT is used to regenerate original images during up-sampling.In the bottleneck of the proposed model,atrous spatial channel pyramid pooling(ASCPP)is used to extract effective high-level features.The ASCPP is the modified pyramid pooling having atrous layers to increase the area of the receptive field.Spatial and channel-based attention are used to focus on the location and class of the identified objects.Finally,watershed transform is used as a post processing technique to identify and refine touching boundaries of nuclei.Nuclei are identified and counted to facilitate pathologists.The same domain of transfer learning is used to retrain the model for domain adaptability.Results of the proposed model are compared with state-of-the-art models,and it outperformed the existing studies.
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.
