Developing an effective liver and liver tumor segmentation model from CT scans is very important for the success of liver cancer diagnosis, surgical planning and cancer treatment. In this work, we propose a two-stage framework for 2D liver and tumor segmentation. The first stage is a coarse liver segmentation network, while the second stage is an edge enhanced network (E$^2$Net) for more accurate liver and tumor segmentation. E$^2$Net explicitly models complementary objects (liver and tumor) and their edge information within the network to preserve the organ and lesion boundaries. We introduce an edge prediction module in E$^2$Net and design an edge distance map between liver and tumor boundaries, which is used as an extra supervision signal to train the edge enhanced network. We also propose a deep cross feature fusion module to refine multi-scale features from both objects and their edges. E$^2$Net is more easily and efficiently trained with a small labeled dataset, and it can be trained/tested on the original 2D CT slices (resolve resampling error issue in 3D models). The proposed framework has shown superior performance on both liver and liver tumor segmentation compared to several state-of-the-art 2D, 3D and 2D/3D hybrid frameworks.
Accurate visualization of liver tumors and their surrounding blood vessels is essential for noninvasive diagnosis and prognosis prediction of tumors. In medical image segmentation, there is still a lack of in-depth research on the simultaneous segmentation of liver tumors and peritumoral blood vessels. To this end, we collect the first liver tumor, and vessel segmentation benchmark datasets containing 52 portal vein phase computed tomography images with liver, liver tumor, and vessel annotations. In this case, we propose a 3D U-shaped Cross-Attention Network (UCA-Net) that utilizes a tailored …
Automatic segmentation of liver tumors in medical images is crucial for the computer-aided diagnosis and therapy. It is a challenging task, since the tumors are notoriously small against the background voxels. This paper proposes a new three-stage curriculum learning approach for training deep networks to tackle this small object segmentation problem. The learning in the first stage is performed on the whole input to obtain an initial deep network for tumor segmenta-tion. Then the second stage of learning focuses the strength-ening of tumor specific features by continuing training the network …
Shandong Normal University（山东师范大学）；Western University（韦仕敦大学）
Simultaneous segmentation and detection of liver tumors (hemangioma and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)) by using multi-modality non-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (NCMRI) are crucial for the clinical diagnosis. However, it is still a challenging task due to: (1) the HCC information on NCMRI is invisible or insufficient makes extraction of liver tumors feature difficult; (2) diverse imaging characteristics in multi-modality NCMRI causes feature fusion and selection difficult; (3) no specific information between hemangioma and HCC on NCMRI cause liver tumors detection difficult. In this stu…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Lenovo Research（联想研究院）；Lenovo Ltd.（联想集团有限公司）
Liver cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide. Due to inconspicuous texture changes of liver tumor, contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) imaging is effective for the diagnosis of liver cancer. In this paper, we focus on improving automated liver tumor segmentation by integrating multi-modal CT images. To this end, we propose a novel mutual learning (ML) strategy for effective and robust multi-modal liver tumor segmentation. Different from existing multi-modal methods that fuse information from different modalities by a single model, with ML, an ensemble of modality-specific mo…
Mansoura University（曼苏尔大学）；South Valley University（南河谷大学）；Higher Institute of Engineering and Technology（高等工程技术学院）
The liver is one of the most critical metabolic organs in vertebrates due to its vital functions in the human body, such as detoxification of the blood from waste products and medications. Liver diseases due to liver tumors are one of the most common mortality reasons around the globe. Hence, detecting liver tumors in the early stages of tumor development is highly required as a critical part of medical treatment. Many imaging modalities can be used as aiding tools to detect liver tumors. Computed tomography (CT) is the most used imaging modality for soft tissue organs such as the liver. This …
James Cook University（詹姆斯·库克大学）；Mahidol University（玛希隆大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）
Automatic segmentation of hepatic lesions in computed tomography (CT) images is a challenging task to perform due to heterogeneous, diffusive shape of tumors and complex background. To address the problem more and more researchers rely on assistance of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) with 2D or 3D type architecture that have proven to be effective in a wide range of computer vision tasks, including medical image processing. In this technical report, we carry out research focused on more careful approach to the process of learning rather than on complex architecture of the CNN. We have…
Automatic extraction of liver and tumor from CT volumes is a challenging task due to their heterogeneous and diffusive shapes. Recently, 2D and 3D deep convolutional neural networks have become popular in medical image segmentation tasks because of the utilization of large labeled datasets to learn hierarchical features. However, 3D networks have some drawbacks due to their high cost on computational resources. In this paper, we propose a 3D hybrid residual attention-aware segmentation method, named RA-UNet, to precisely extract the liver volume of interests (VOI) and segment tumors from the l…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Lenovo Research（联想研究院）；Lenovo Ltd.（联想有限公司）
Purpose: Automated liver tumor segmentation from Computed Tomography (CT) images is a necessary prerequisite in the interventions of hepatic abnormalities and surgery planning. However, accurate liver tumor segmentation remains challenging due to the large variability of tumor sizes and inhomogeneous texture. Recent advances based on Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) for medical image segmentation drew on the success of learning discriminative pyramid features. In this paper, we propose a Decoupled Pyramid Correlation Network (DPC-Net) that exploits attention mechanisms to fully leverage both …
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；LMU Hospital Grosshadern（路德维希-马克西米利安-慕尼黑大学格罗斯哈德恩医院）
Automatic segmentation of the liver and hepatic lesions is an important step towards deriving quantitative biomarkers for accurate clinical diagnosis and computer-aided decision support systems. This paper presents a method to automatically segment liver and lesions in CT and MRI abdomen images using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCNs) enabling the segmentation of a large-scale medical trial or quantitative image analysis. We train and cascade two FCNs for a combined segmentation of the liver and its lesions. In the first step, we train a FCN to segment the liver as ROI input …
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Hebrew University of Jerusalem（希伯来大学）；Radboud University Medical Center（拉德堡德大学医学中心）；The University of Montréal Hospital Research Centre（蒙特利尔大学医院研究中心）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
In this work, we report the set-up and results of the Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS), which was organized in conjunction with the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2017 and the International Conferences on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2017 and 2018. The image dataset is diverse and contains primary and secondary tumors with varied sizes and appearances with various lesion-to-background levels (hyper-/hypo-dense), created in collaboration with seven hospitals and research institutions. Seventy-five submitted liver and liv…
Enhanced Liver Tumor Detection in CT Images Using 3D U-Net and Bat Algorithm for Hyperparameter Optimization
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Loyola University Chicago（洛约拉大学芝加哥分校数学与统计学系）；Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch（伊斯兰 Azad 大学科学与研究分校数学与计算机科学系）
本文提出将 3D U-Net 架构与 Bat Algorithm 结合，通过优化学习率和批大小等超参数实现 CT 图像中肝肿瘤的自动分割，有效提升了分割精度与鲁棒性。
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学尔湾分校）
The segmentation of liver lesions is crucial for detection, diagnosis and monitoring progression of liver cancer. However, design of accurate automated methods remains challenging due to high noise in CT scans, low contrast between liver and lesions, as well as large lesion variability. We propose a 3D automatic, unsupervised method for liver lesions segmentation using a phase separation approach. It is assumed that liver is a mixture of two phases: healthy liver and lesions, represented by different image intensities polluted by noise. The Cahn-Hilliard equation is used to remove the noise an…
Comparative Study of UNet-based Architectures for Liver Tumor Segmentation in Multi-Phase Contrast-Enhanced Computed Tomography
School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；The Saigon International University（暹罗国际大学）；School of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程学院）；International University（国际大学）；Vietnam National University HCMC（越南国家大学胡志明市分校）
Transfer learning and joint learning approaches are extensively used to improve the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In medical imaging applications in which the target dataset is typically very small, transfer learning improves feature learning while joint learning has shown effectiveness in improving the network's generalization and robustness. In this work, we study the combination of these two approaches for the problem of liver lesion segmentation and classification. For this purpose, 332 abdominal CT slices containing lesion segmentation and classification of three le…
PLUS: Plug-and-Play Enhanced Liver Lesion Diagnosis Model on Non-Contrast CT Scans
School of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学生物医学工程学院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里集团达摩院）；Hupan Lab（汇看实验室）；Department of Radiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University（中国医科大学附属盛京医院放射科）；Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院肝胆外科）
Surgical resections are the most prevalent curative treatment for primary liver cancer. Tumors located in critical positions are known to complexify liver resections (LR). While experienced surgeons in specialized medical centers may have the necessary expertise to accurately anticipate LR complexity, and prepare accordingly, an objective method able to reproduce this behavior would have the potential to improve the standard routine of care, and avoid intra- and postoperative complications. In this article, we propose CoRe, an automated medical image processing pipeline for the prediction of p…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学附属第一医院）；Infervision Inc.（推想医疗科技股份有限公司）
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the second most frequent cause of malignancy-related death and is one of the diseases with the highest incidence in the world. Because the liver is the only organ in the human body that is supplied by two major vessels: the hepatic artery and the portal vein, various types of malignant tumors can spread from other organs to the liver. And due to the liver masses' heterogeneous and diffusive shape, the tumor lesions are very difficult to be recognized, thus automatic lesion detection is necessary for the doctors with huge workloads. To assist doctors, this work…
Multi-target and multi-stage liver lesion segmentation and detection in multi-phase computed tomography scans
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油矿产大学）；Vinbrain JSC（Vinbrain股份公司）；Le Quy Don Technical University（黎贵敦技术大学）；University Medical Center at Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市大学医疗中心）
Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Glioblastoma is a common brain malignancy that tends to occur in older adults and is almost always lethal. The effectiveness of chemotherapy, being the standard treatment for most cancer types, can be improved if a particular genetic sequence in the tumor known as MGMT promoter is methylated. However, to identify the state of the MGMT promoter, the conventional approach is to perform a biopsy for genetic analysis, which is time and effort consuming. A couple of recent publications proposed a connection between the MGMT promoter state and the MRI scans of the tumor and hence suggested the use o…
A Digital Pathology Resource for Liver Cancer Quantification with Datasets, Benchmarks, and Tools
Department of Pathology, Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, School of Clinical Medicine, Tsinghua Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（北京清华长庚医院病理科，临床医学学院，清华大学医学院，清华大学，北京，中国）；Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China（深圳国际研究生院，清华大学，深圳，中国）
National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）；National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases（国家糖尿病、消化和肾脏疾病研究所）
Finding small lesions is very challenging due to lack of noticeable features, severe class imbalance, as well as the size itself. One approach to improve small lesion segmentation is to reduce the region of interest and inspect it at a higher sensitivity rather than performing it for the entire region. It is usually implemented as sequential or joint segmentation of organ and lesion, which requires additional supervision on organ segmentation. Instead, we propose to utilize an intensity distribution of a target lesion at no additional labeling cost to effectively separate regions where the les…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
CancerUniT: Towards a Single Unified Model for Effective Detection, Segmentation, and Diagnosis of Eight Major Cancers Using a Large Collection of CT Scans
DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Hupan Lab（湖畔实验室）；Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center（中山大学肿瘤防治中心）；Sichuan Cancer Hospital（四川省肿瘤医院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院）；Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University（中国医科大学附属盛京医院）；Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）
Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心影像科学中心）
Most MRI liver segmentation methods use a structural 3D scan as input, such as a T1 or T2 weighted scan. Segmentation performance may be improved by utilizing both structural and functional information, as contained in dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MR series. Dynamic information can be incorporated in a segmentation method based on convolutional neural networks in a number of ways. In this study, the optimal input configuration of DCE MR images for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is studied. The performance of three different input configurations for CNNs is studied for a liver segmenta…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Lenovo Research（联想研究院）
Liver tumor segmentation plays an important role in hepatocellular carcinoma diagnosis and surgical planning. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Feature Attention Network (SFAN) for liver tumor segmentation from Computed Tomography (CT) volumes, which exploits the impact of both low-level and high-level features. In the SFAN, a Semantic Attention Transmission (SAT) module is designed to select discriminative low-level localization details with the guidance of neighboring high-level semantic information. Furthermore, a Global Context Attention (GCA) module is proposed to effectively fus…
A-QCF-Net: An Adaptive Quaternion Cross-Fusion Network for Multimodal Liver Tumor Segmentation from Unpaired Datasets
University College of Engineering, Bharathidasan Institute of Technology Campus, Anna University（安娜大学工程学院，巴拉特拉桑理工学院校区，安娜大学）；National Institute of Technology（国家理工学院）
Mask-guided Data Augmentation for Multiparametric MRI Generation with a Rare Hepatocellular Carcinoma
Universidad Industrial de Santander（桑坦德工业大学）；University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse 3（图卢兹第三大学（保罗·萨巴蒂埃大学））；Bicêtre University Hospital（比塞特尔大学医院）；Assistance publique des hôpitaux de Paris（巴黎公共援助医院）；Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学（克洛德·贝尔纳里昂第一大学））
Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；General Electric Healthcare（通用电气医疗集团）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）
Gliomas are one of the most frequent brain tumors and are classified into high grade and low grade gliomas. The segmentation of various regions such as tumor core, enhancing tumor etc. plays an important role in determining severity and prognosis. Here, we have developed a multi-threshold model based on attention U-Net for identification of various regions of the tumor in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We propose a multi-path segmentation and built three separate models for the different regions of interest. The proposed model achieved mean Dice Coefficient of 0.59, 0.72, and 0.61 for enhan…
The UK Biobank Imaging Study has acquired medical scans of more than 40,000 volunteer participants. The resulting wealth of anatomical information has been made available for research, together with extensive metadata including measurements of liver fat. These values play an important role in metabolic disease, but are only available for a minority of imaged subjects as their collection requires the careful work of image analysts on dedicated liver MRI. Another UK Biobank protocol is neck-to-knee body MRI for analysis of body composition. The resulting volumes can also quantify fat fractions, …
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；Qingdao Municipal Hospital（青岛市市立医院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Liver cancer is one of the most common malignant diseases in the world. Segmentation and labeling of liver tumors and blood vessels in CT images can provide convenience for doctors in liver tumor diagnosis and surgical intervention. In the past decades, many state-of-the-art medical image segmentation algorithms appeared during this period. With the development of embedded devices, embedded deployment for medical segmentation and automatic reconstruction brings prospects for future automated surgical tasks. Yet, most of the existing segmentation methods mostly care about the spatial feature co…
Otto-von-Guericke University（奥托·冯·格里克大学）；University Hospital of Magdeburg（马格德堡大学医院）
Deep learning-based segmentation of the liver and hepatic lesions therein steadily gains relevance in clinical practice due to the increasing incidence of liver cancer each year. Whereas various network variants with overall promising results in the field of medical image segmentation have been successfully developed over the last years, almost all of them struggle with the challenge of accurately segmenting hepatic lesions in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This led to the idea of combining elements of convolutional and transformer-based architectures to overcome the existing limitations. T…
PAII Inc.（PAII 公司）；Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou Medical Center（长庚纪念医院林口医学中心）；Institute of Molecular and Genomic Medicine, National Health Research Institutes（国家卫生研究院分子与基因组医学研究所）；Ping An Insurance Group（平安保险集团）
Background & Aims: Hepatic steatosis is a major cause of chronic liver disease. 2D ultrasound is the most widely used non-invasive tool for screening and monitoring, but associated diagnoses are highly subjective. We developed a scalable deep learning (DL) algorithm for quantitative scoring of liver steatosis from 2D ultrasound images. Approach & Results: Using retrospectively collected multi-view ultrasound data from 3,310 patients, 19,513 studies, and 228,075 images, we trained a DL algorithm to diagnose steatosis stages (healthy, mild, moderate, or severe) from ultrasound diagnoses. Perform…
Medical imaging is the most important tool for detecting complications in the inner body of medicine. Nowadays, with the development of image processing technology as well as changing the size of photos to higher resolution images in the field of digital medical imaging, there is an efficient and accurate system for segmenting this. Real-world images that for a variety of reasons have poor heterogeneity, noise and contrast are essential. Digital image segmentation in medicine is used for diagnostic and therapeutic analysis, which is very helpful for physicians. In this study, we aim at liver c…
Trustworthy Multi-phase Liver Tumor Segmentation via Evidence-based Uncertainty
Southeast University（东南大学）；the First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院）；Zhongda Hospital, School of Medicine, Southeast University（东南大学医学院附属中大医院）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong – Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University（南京医科大学第一附属医院）
We demonstrate that AI models can accurately segment liver tumors without the need for manual annotation by using synthetic tumors in CT scans. Our synthetic tumors have two intriguing advantages: (I) realistic in shape and texture, which even medical professionals can confuse with real tumors; (II) effective for training AI models, which can perform liver tumor segmentation similarly to the model trained on real tumors -- this result is exciting because no existing work, using synthetic tumors only, has thus far reached a similar or even close performance to real tumors. This result also impl…
Over the last few years, deep learning has proven to be a great solution to many problems, such as image or text classification. Recently, deep learning-based solutions have outperformed humans on selected benchmark datasets, yielding a promising future for scientific and real-world applications. Training of deep learning models requires vast amounts of high quality data to achieve such supreme performance. In real-world scenarios, obtaining a large, coherent, and properly labeled dataset is a challenging task. This is especially true in medical applications, where high-quality data and annota…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学）；Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital（邵逸夫医院）；The First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine, Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院）
Multi-phase computed tomography (CT) images provide crucial complementary information for accurate liver tumor segmentation (LiTS). State-of-the-art multi-phase LiTS methods usually fused cross-phase features through phase-weighted summation or channel-attention based concatenation. However, these methods ignored the spatial (pixel-wise) relationships between different phases, hence leading to insufficient feature integration. In addition, the performance of existing methods remains subject to the uncertainty in segmentation, which is particularly acute in tumor boundary regions. In this work,…
Brain Tumor Classification from MRI Scans via Transfer Learning and Enhanced Feature Representation
Department of CSE, Netrokona University（计算机科学与工程系，Netrokona大学）；Department of CSE, The University of Rajshahi（计算机科学与工程系，拉贾沙希大学）；Department of Information Technology, Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Computing, Georgia Southern University（信息技术系，乔治亚南方大学）；Centre for Image and Vision Computing (CIVC), COE for Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Engineering (FAIE), Multimedia University（图像与视觉计算中心（CIVC），人工智能学院，人工智能与工程学院，多媒体大学）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Varian Medical Systems（瓦里安医疗系统公司）；Huiyihuiying Medical Co（慧医慧影医疗公司）；Google Inc（谷歌公司）
Segmentation of livers and liver tumors is one of the most important steps in radiation therapy of hepatocellular carcinoma. The segmentation task is often done manually, making it tedious, labor intensive, and subject to intra-/inter- operator variations. While various algorithms for delineating organ-at-risks (OARs) and tumor targets have been proposed, automatic segmentation of livers and liver tumors remains intractable due to their low tissue contrast with respect to the surrounding organs and their deformable shape in CT images. The U-Net has gained increasing popularity recently for ima…
Explainability of decisions made by deep neural networks is of high value as it allows for validation and improvement of models. This work proposes an approach to explain semantic segmentation networks by means of layer-wise relevance propagation. As an exemplary application, we investigate which MRI sequences are most relevant for liver tumor segmentation.
School of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, Jiangsu University（江苏大学计算机科学与通信工程学院）；Department of Imaging, Affiliated Hospital of Jiangsu University（江苏大学附属医院影像科）；Department of Information, Affiliated Hospital of Jiangsu University（江苏大学附属医院信息科）；Medical College of Jiangsu University（江苏大学医学院）
Diff4MMLiTS: Advanced Multimodal Liver Tumor Segmentation via Diffusion-Based Image Synthesis and Alignment
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China（电子与电气工程系，南方科技大学，深圳，中国）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China（电气与电子工程系，香港大学，香港特别行政区，中国）；Department of Radiology, Zhongda Hospital, Medical School, Southeast University, Nanjing, China（放射科，中大医院，医学院，东南大学，南京，中国）；Jiaxing Research Institute, Southern University of Science and Technology, Jiaxing, China（嘉兴研究所，南方科技大学，嘉兴，中国）
