RMS-UNet: Residual multi-scale UNet for liver and lesion segmentation

Abstract

Precise segmentation is in demand for hepatocellular carcinoma or metastasis clinical diagnosis due to the heterogeneous appearance and diverse anatomy of the liver on scanned abdominal computed tomography (CT) images. In this study, we present an automatic unified registration-free deep-learning-based model with residual block and dilated convolution for training end-to-end liver and lesion segmentation. A multi-scale approach has also been utilized to explore novel inter-slice features with multi-channel input images. A novel objective function is introduced to deal with fore- and background pixels imbalance based on the joint metric of dice coefficient and absolute volumetric difference. Further, batch normalization is used to improve the learning without any loss of useful information. The proposed methodology is extensively validated and tested on 30% of the publicly available Dircadb, LiTS, Sliver07, and Chaos datasets. A comparative analysis is conducted based on multiple evaluation metrics frequently used in segmentation competitions. The results show substantial improvement, with mean dice scores of 97.31, 97.38, 97.39 and 95.49% for the Dircadb, LiTS, Sliver07, and Chaos liver test sets, and 91.92 and 86.70% for Dircadb and LiTS lesion segmentation. It should be noted that we achieve the best lesion segmentation performance on common datasets. The obtained qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our proposed model outperform other state-of-the-art methods for liver and lesion segmentation, with competitive performance on additional datasets. Henceforth, it is envisaged as being applicable to pertinent medical segmentation applications.

Keywords: Abdominal CT; Deep learning; Dilated convolution; Liver and lesion segmentation; Residual.