Automatic Liver Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Dense-UNet and Graph Cuts

YANG Zhen; DI Shuanhu; ZHAO Yuqian; LIAO Miao; ZENG Yezhan

doi:10.11999/JEIT210247

Volume 44 Issue 5

May 2022

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Article Navigation > Journal of Electronics & Information Technology > 2022 > 44(5): 1683-1693

YANG Zhen, DI Shuanhu, ZHAO Yuqian, LIAO Miao, ZENG Yezhan. Automatic Liver Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Dense-UNet and Graph Cuts[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology, 2022, 44(5): 1683-1693. doi: 10.11999/JEIT210247

Citation:

YANG Zhen, DI Shuanhu, ZHAO Yuqian, LIAO Miao, ZENG Yezhan. Automatic Liver Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Dense-UNet and Graph Cuts[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology, 2022, 44(5): 1683-1693. doi: 10.11999/JEIT210247

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Automatic Liver Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Dense-UNet and Graph Cuts

doi: 10.11999/JEIT210247

YANG Zhen^{1, 2},
DI Shuanhu¹,
ZHAO Yuqian^{1, 3
,
,},
LIAO Miao^{1, 4},
ZENG Yezhan⁵

1.
School of Automation, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
2.
Department of Oncology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
3.
Hunan Xiangjiang Artificial Intelligence Academy, Changsha, 410083, China
4.
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan 411100, China
5.
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University of Technology, Zhuzhou 412007, China

Funds: The National Natural Science Foundation of China (62076256, 61772555, 61702179), The Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department (20B239,18C0497), The Postgraduate Scientific Research Innovation Project of Hunan Province (CX20200129), Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2021JJ30275)

Received Date: 2021-03-26
Rev Recd Date: 2021-08-24

Available Online: 2021-09-14

Publish Date: 2022-05-25

Abstract

Abstract

Liver tumor segmentation from abdominal CT image is an important prerequisite for liver disease diagnosis, surgical planning, and radiation therapy. However, the segmentation remains a challenging problem since the tumors in CT images generally have heterogeneous intensities, complicated textures, and ambiguous boundaries. To address this, an automatic, accurate, and robust segmentation method is proposed based on cascaded Dense-Unet and graph cuts. Firstly, the cascaded Dense-UNet is used to obtain liver tumor initial segmentation results as well as the tumor Regions Of Interest (ROIs). Then, an intensity model and a probability model are established respectively by utilizing pixel-wise and patch-wise features in order to distinguish between tumor and non-tumor, and these models are further integrated into the graph cuts energy function to segment the tumor from ROIs accurately. Finally, experiments are carried out on LiTS and 3Dircadb datasets, which are respectively used as training set and testing set, and this method is compared with many other existing automatic segmentation methods. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can segment liver tumors in CT images with different intensity, texture, shape and size more effectively and can extract the tumor boundaries more accurately than other methods, especially for the tumors with low contrasts and ambiguous boundaries.
- CT image,
- Tumor segmentation,
- Dense-UNet,
- Graph cuts

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References(19)

References

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