Song Zhendong, Wu Huiming, Chen Wei, Slowik Adam
School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Shenzhen, 518055, China.
Koszalin University of Technology, Koszalin, Poland.
Heliyon. 2024 Mar 21;10(7):e28538. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e28538. eCollection 2024 Apr 15.
Liver tumors are one of the most aggressive malignancies in the human body. Computer-aided technology and liver interventional surgery are effective in the prediction, identification and management of liver neoplasms. One of the important processes is to accurately grasp the morphological structure of the liver and liver blood vessels. However, accurate identification and segmentation of hepatic blood vessels in CT images poses a formidable challenge. Manually locating and segmenting liver vessels in CT images is time-consuming and impractical. There is an imperative clinical requirement for a precise and effective algorithm to segment liver vessels. In response to this demand, the current paper advocates a liver vessel segmentation approach that employs an enhanced 3D fully convolutional neural network V-Net. The network model improves the basic network structure according to the characteristics of liver vessels. First, a pyramidal convolution block is introduced between the encoder and decoder of the network to improve the network localization ability. Then, multi-resolution deep supervision is introduced in the network, resulting in more robust segmentation. Finally, by fusing feature maps of different resolutions, the overall segmentation result is predicted. Evaluation experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our improved scheme can increase the segmentation ability of existing network models for liver vessels. Compared with the existing work, the experimental outcomes demonstrate that the technique presented in this manuscript has attained superior performance on the Dice Coefficient index, which can promote the treatment of liver tumors.
肝脏肿瘤是人体中最具侵袭性的恶性肿瘤之一。计算机辅助技术和肝脏介入手术在肝脏肿瘤的预测、识别和管理方面是有效的。其中一个重要过程是准确掌握肝脏和肝血管的形态结构。然而,在CT图像中准确识别和分割肝血管是一项艰巨的挑战。在CT图像中手动定位和分割肝血管既耗时又不切实际。临床上迫切需要一种精确有效的算法来分割肝血管。针对这一需求,本文提出了一种采用增强型3D全卷积神经网络V-Net的肝血管分割方法。该网络模型根据肝血管的特征改进了基本网络结构。首先,在网络的编码器和解码器之间引入金字塔卷积块,以提高网络的定位能力。然后,在网络中引入多分辨率深度监督,从而实现更稳健的分割。最后,通过融合不同分辨率的特征图来预测整体分割结果。在公共数据集上的评估实验表明,我们改进后的方案可以提高现有网络模型对肝血管的分割能力。与现有工作相比,实验结果表明本文提出的技术在骰子系数指标上取得了优异的性能,这有助于促进肝脏肿瘤的治疗。