Chi Mengxian, An Hong, Jin Xu, Nie Zhenguo
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Entropy (Basel). 2024 Feb 15;26(2):166. doi: 10.3390/e26020166.
Brain tumor segmentation using neural networks presents challenges in accurately capturing diverse tumor shapes and sizes while maintaining real-time performance. Additionally, addressing class imbalance is crucial for achieving accurate clinical results. To tackle these issues, this study proposes a novel N-shaped lightweight network that combines multiple feature pyramid paths and U-Net architectures. Furthermore, we ingeniously integrate hybrid attention mechanisms into various locations of depth-wise separable convolution module to improve efficiency, with channel attention found to be the most effective for skip connections in the proposed network. Moreover, we introduce a combination loss function that incorporates a newly designed weighted cross-entropy loss and dice loss to effectively tackle the issue of class imbalance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four publicly available datasets, i.e., UCSF-PDGM, BraTS 2021, BraTS 2019, and MSD Task 01 to evaluate the performance of different methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed network achieves superior segmentation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. The proposed network not only improves the overall segmentation performance but also provides a favorable computational efficiency, making it a promising approach for clinical applications.
使用神经网络进行脑肿瘤分割面临着诸多挑战,即在保持实时性能的同时准确捕捉各种肿瘤的形状和大小。此外,解决类别不平衡问题对于获得准确的临床结果至关重要。为了解决这些问题,本研究提出了一种新颖的N形轻量级网络,该网络结合了多个特征金字塔路径和U-Net架构。此外,我们巧妙地将混合注意力机制集成到深度可分离卷积模块的不同位置以提高效率,发现通道注意力对于所提出网络中的跳跃连接最为有效。此外,我们引入了一种组合损失函数,该函数结合了新设计的加权交叉熵损失和骰子损失,以有效解决类别不平衡问题。我们在四个公开可用的数据集上进行了广泛的实验,即UCSF-PDGM、BraTS 2021、BraTS 2019和MSD任务01,以评估不同方法的性能。结果表明,与现有方法相比,所提出的网络实现了更高的分割精度。所提出的网络不仅提高了整体分割性能,还提供了良好的计算效率,使其成为临床应用中一种很有前景的方法。