scholarly journals SA-Net: A scale-attention network for medical image segmentation

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0247388
Author(s):  
Jingfei Hu ◽  
Hua Wang ◽  
Jie Wang ◽  
Yunqi Wang ◽  
Fang He ◽  
...  

Semantic segmentation of medical images provides an important cornerstone for subsequent tasks of image analysis and understanding. With rapid advancements in deep learning methods, conventional U-Net segmentation networks have been applied in many fields. Based on exploratory experiments, features at multiple scales have been found to be of great importance for the segmentation of medical images. In this paper, we propose a scale-attention deep learning network (SA-Net), which extracts features of different scales in a residual module and uses an attention module to enforce the scale-attention capability. SA-Net can better learn the multi-scale features and achieve more accurate segmentation for different medical image. In addition, this work validates the proposed method across multiple datasets. The experiment results show SA-Net achieves excellent performances in the applications of vessel detection in retinal images, lung segmentation, artery/vein(A/V) classification in retinal images and blastocyst segmentation. To facilitate SA-Net utilization by the scientific community, the code implementation will be made publicly available.

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Fengping An ◽  
Xiaowei Li ◽  
Xingmin Ma

Due to the complexity of medical images, traditional medical image classification methods have been unable to meet the actual application needs. In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning theory has provided a technical approach for solving medical image classification. However, deep learning has the following problems in the application of medical image classification. First, it is impossible to construct a deep learning model with excellent performance according to the characteristics of medical images. Second, the current deep learning network structure and training strategies are less adaptable to medical images. Therefore, this paper first introduces the visual attention mechanism into the deep learning model so that the information can be extracted more effectively according to the problem of medical images, and the reasoning is realized at a finer granularity. It can increase the interpretability of the model. Additionally, to solve the problem of matching the deep learning network structure and training strategy to medical images, this paper will construct a novel multiscale convolutional neural network model that can automatically extract high-level discriminative appearance features from the original image, and the loss function uses the Mahalanobis distance optimization model to obtain a better training strategy, which can improve the robust performance of the network model. The medical image classification task is completed by the above method. Based on the above ideas, this paper proposes a medical classification algorithm based on a visual attention mechanism-multiscale convolutional neural network. The lung nodules and breast cancer images were classified by the method in this paper. The experimental results show that the accuracy of medical image classification in this paper is not only higher than that of traditional machine learning methods but also improved compared with other deep learning methods, and the method has good stability and robustness.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Müller ◽  
Frank Kramer

Abstract Background The increased availability and usage of modern medical imaging induced a strong need for automatic medical image segmentation. Still, current image segmentation platforms do not provide the required functionalities for plain setup of medical image segmentation pipelines. Already implemented pipelines are commonly standalone software, optimized on a specific public data set. Therefore, this paper introduces the open-source Python library MIScnn. Implementation The aim of MIScnn is to provide an intuitive API allowing fast building of medical image segmentation pipelines including data I/O, preprocessing, data augmentation, patch-wise analysis, metrics, a library with state-of-the-art deep learning models and model utilization like training, prediction, as well as fully automatic evaluation (e.g. cross-validation). Similarly, high configurability and multiple open interfaces allow full pipeline customization. Results Running a cross-validation with MIScnn on the Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge 2019 data set (multi-class semantic segmentation with 300 CT scans) resulted into a powerful predictor based on the standard 3D U-Net model. Conclusions With this experiment, we could show that the MIScnn framework enables researchers to rapidly set up a complete medical image segmentation pipeline by using just a few lines of code. The source code for MIScnn is available in the Git repository: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/MIScnn.


Medical imaging classification is playing a vital role in identifying and diagnoses the diseases, which is very helpful to doctor. Conventional ways classify supported the form, color, and/or texture, most of tiny problematic areas haven’t shown in medical images, which meant less efficient classification and that has poor ability to identify disease. Advanced deep learning algorithms provide an efficient way to construct a finished model that can compute final classification labels with the raw pixels of medical images. These conventional algorithms are not sufficient for high resolution images due to small dataset size, advanced deep learning models suffer from very high computational costs and limitations in the channels and multilayers in the channels. To overcome these limitations, we proposed a new algorithm Normalized Coding Network with Multi-scale Perceptron (NCNMP), which combines high-level features and traditional features. The Architecture of the proposed model includes three stages. Training, retrieve, fuse. We examined the proposed algorithm on medical image dataset NIH2626. We got an overall image classification accuracy of 91.35, which are greater than the present methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e607
Author(s):  
Ayat Abedalla ◽  
Malak Abdullah ◽  
Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub ◽  
Elhadj Benkhelifa

Medical imaging refers to visualization techniques to provide valuable information about the internal structures of the human body for clinical applications, diagnosis, treatment, and scientific research. Segmentation is one of the primary methods for analyzing and processing medical images, which helps doctors diagnose accurately by providing detailed information on the body’s required part. However, segmenting medical images faces several challenges, such as requiring trained medical experts and being time-consuming and error-prone. Thus, it appears necessary for an automatic medical image segmentation system. Deep learning algorithms have recently shown outstanding performance for segmentation tasks, especially semantic segmentation networks that provide pixel-level image understanding. By introducing the first fully convolutional network (FCN) for semantic image segmentation, several segmentation networks have been proposed on its basis. One of the state-of-the-art convolutional networks in the medical image field is U-Net. This paper presents a novel end-to-end semantic segmentation model, named Ens4B-UNet, for medical images that ensembles four U-Net architectures with pre-trained backbone networks. Ens4B-UNet utilizes U-Net’s success with several significant improvements by adapting powerful and robust convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as backbones for U-Nets encoders and using the nearest-neighbor up-sampling in the decoders. Ens4B-UNet is designed based on the weighted average ensemble of four encoder-decoder segmentation models. The backbone networks of all ensembled models are pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset to exploit the benefit of transfer learning. For improving our models, we apply several techniques for training and predicting, including stochastic weight averaging (SWA), data augmentation, test-time augmentation (TTA), and different types of optimal thresholds. We evaluate and test our models on the 2019 Pneumothorax Challenge dataset, which contains 12,047 training images with 12,954 masks and 3,205 test images. Our proposed segmentation network achieves a 0.8608 mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) on the test set, which is among the top one-percent systems in the Kaggle competition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 20508-1-20508-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Getao Du ◽  
Xu Cao ◽  
Jimin Liang ◽  
Xueli Chen ◽  
Yonghua Zhan

Abstract Medical image analysis is performed by analyzing images obtained by medical imaging systems to solve clinical problems. The purpose is to extract effective information and improve the level of clinical diagnosis. In recent years, automatic segmentation based on deep learning (DL) methods has been widely used, where a neural network can automatically learn image features, which is in sharp contrast with the traditional manual learning method. U-net is one of the most important semantic segmentation frameworks for a convolutional neural network (CNN). It is widely used in the medical image analysis domain for lesion segmentation, anatomical segmentation, and classification. The advantage of this network framework is that it can not only accurately segment the desired feature target and effectively process and objectively evaluate medical images but also help to improve accuracy in the diagnosis by medical images. Therefore, this article presents a literature review of medical image segmentation based on U-net, focusing on the successful segmentation experience of U-net for different lesion regions in six medical imaging systems. Along with the latest advances in DL, this article introduces the method of combining the original U-net architecture with deep learning and a method for improving the U-net network.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 568-575
Author(s):  
Yamina Azzi ◽  
Abdelouahab Moussaoui ◽  
Mohand-Tahar Kechadi

Semantic segmentation is one of the biggest challenging tasks in computer vision, especially in medical image analysis, it helps to locate and identify pathological structures automatically. It is an active research area. Continuously different techniques are proposed. Recently Deep Learning is the latest technique used intensively to improve the performance in medical image segmentation. For this reason, we present in this non-systematic review a preliminary description about semantic segmentation with deep learning and the most important steps to build a model that deal with this problem.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Shaolei Lang ◽  
Yinxia Xu ◽  
Liang Li ◽  
Bin Wang ◽  
Yang Yang ◽  
...  

In recent years, the incidence of thyroid nodules has shown an increasing trend year by year and has become one of the important diseases that endanger human health. Ultrasound medical images based on deep learning are widely used in clinical diagnosis due to their cheapness, no radiation, and low cost. The use of image processing technology to accurately segment the nodule area provides important auxiliary information for the doctor’s diagnosis, which is of great value for guiding clinical treatment. The purpose of this article is to explore the application value of combined detection of abnormal sugar-chain glycoprotein (TAP) and carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) in the risk estimation of thyroid cancer in patients with thyroid nodules of type IV and above based on deep learning medical images. In this paper, ultrasound thyroid images are used as the research content, and the active contour level set method is used as the segmentation basis, and a segmentation algorithm for thyroid nodules is proposed. This paper takes ultrasound thyroid images as the research content, uses the active contour level set method as the basis of segmentation, and proposes an image segmentation algorithm Fast-SegNet based on deep learning, which extends the network model that was mainly used for thyroid medical image segmentation to more scenarios of the segmentation task. From January 2019 to October 2020, 400 patients with thyroid nodules of type IV and above were selected for physical examination and screening at the Health Management Center of our hospital, and they were diagnosed as thyroid cancer by pathological examination of thyroid nodules under B-ultrasound positioning. The detection rates of thyroid cancer in patients with thyroid nodules of type IV and above are compared; serum TAP and CEA levels are detected; PT-PCR is used to detect TTF-1, PTEN, and NIS expression; the detection, missed diagnosis, misdiagnosis rate, and diagnostic efficiency of the three detection methods are compared. This article uses the thyroid nodule region segmented based on deep learning medical images and compares experiments with CV model, LBF model, and DRLSE model. The experimental results show that the segmentation overlap rate of this method is as high as 98.4%, indicating that the algorithm proposed in this paper can more accurately extract the thyroid nodule area.


10.29007/r6cd ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoang Nhut Huynh ◽  
My Duyen Nguyen ◽  
Thai Hong Truong ◽  
Quoc Tuan Nguyen Diep ◽  
Anh Tu Tran ◽  
...  

Segmentation is one of the most common methods for analyzing and processing medical images, assisting doctors in making accurate diagnoses by providing detailed information about the required body part. However, segmenting medical images presents a number of challenges, including the need for medical professionals to be trained, the fact that it is time-consuming and prone to errors. As a result, it appears that an automated medical image segmentation system is required. Deep learning algorithms have recently demonstrated superior performance for segmentation tasks, particularly semantic segmentation networks that provide a pixel-level understanding of images. U- Net for image segmentation is one of the modern complex networks in the field of medical imaging; several segmentation networks have been built on its foundation with the advancements of Recurrent Residual convolutional units and the construction of recurrent residual convolutional neural network based on U-Net (R2U-Net). R2U-Net is used to perform trachea and bronchial segmentation on a dataset of 36,000 images. With a variety of experiments, the proposed segmentation resulted in a dice-coefficient of 0.8394 on the test dataset. Finally, a number of research issues are raised, indicating the need for future improvements.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
En Zhou Ye ◽  
En Hui Ye ◽  
Run Zhou Ye

Introduction: Analysis of multimodal medical images often requires the selection of one or many anatomical regions of interest (ROIs) for extraction of useful statistics. This task can prove laborious when a manual approach is used. We have previously developed a user-friendly software tool for image-to-image translation using deep learning. Therefore, we present herein an update to the DeepImageTranslator software with the addiction of a tool for multimodal medical image segmentation analysis (hereby referred to as the MMMISA). Methods: The MMMISA was implemented using the Tkinter library. Backend computations were implemented using the Pydicom, Numpy, and OpenCV libraries. We tested our software using 4188 whole-body axial 2-deoxy-2-[18F]-fluoroglucose-position emission tomography/computed tomography ([18F]-FDG-PET/CT) slices of 10 patients from the ACRIN-HNSCC (American College of Radiology Imaging Network-Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma) database. Using the deep learning software DeepImageTranslator, a model was trained with 36 randomly selected CT slices and manually labelled semantic segmentation maps. Utilizing the trained model, all the CT scans of the 10 HNSCC patients were segmented with high accuracy. Segmentation maps generated using the deep convolutional network were then used to measure organ specific [18F]-FDG uptake. We also compared measurements performed using the MMMISA and those made with manually selected ROIs. Results: The MMMISA is a tool that allows user to select ROIs based on deep learning-generated segmentation maps and to compute accurate statistics for these ROIs based on coregistered multimodal images. We found that organ-specific [18F]-FDG uptake measured using multiple manually selected ROIs is concordant with whole-tissue measurements made with segmentation maps using the MMMISA tool.


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