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）
Segmentation of liver structures in multi-phase contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CECT) plays a crucial role in computer-aided diagnosis and treatment planning. In this study, we investigate the performance of UNet-based architectures for liver tumor segmentation, evaluating ResNet, Transformer-based, and State-space (Mamba) backbones initialized with pretrained weights. Our comparative analysis reveals that despite the theoretical advantages of modern architectures in modeling long-range dependencies, ResNet-based models demonstrated superior sample efficiency on this dataset. This suggests that the inherent inductive biases of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) remain advantageous for generalizing on limited medical data compared to data-hungry alternatives. To further improve segmentation quality, we introduce attention mechanisms into the backbone, finding that the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) yields the optimal configuration. The ResNetUNet3+ with CBAM achieved the highest nominal performance with a Dice score of 0.755 and IoU of 0.662, while also delivering the most precise boundary delineation (lowest HD95 of 77.911). Critically, while statistical testing indicated that the improvement in mean Dice score was not significant (p > 0.05) compared to the baseline, the proposed model exhibited greater stability (lower standard deviation) and higher specificity (0.926). These findings demonstrate that classical ResNet architectures, when enhanced with modern attention modules, provide a robust and statistically comparable alternative to emerging methods, offering a stable direction for liver tumor segmentation in clinical practice.
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 …
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…
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…
National Institutes of Health Clinical Center（美国国立卫生研究院临床中心）；Ping An Insurance Company of China（中国平安保险公司）
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…
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 …
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 …
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable success in automatically segmenting organs or lesions on 3D medical images. Recently, vision transformer networks have exhibited exceptional performance in 2D image classification tasks. Compared with CNNs, transformer networks have an appealing advantage of extracting long-range features due to their self-attention algorithm. Therefore, we propose a CNN-Transformer combined model, called BiTr-Unet, with specific modifications for brain tumor segmentation on multi-modal MRI scans. Our BiTr-Unet achieves good performance on the BraTS…
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 …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) achieves remarkable performance for medical image analysis. UNet is the primary source in the performance of 3D CNN architectures for medical imaging tasks, including brain tumor segmentation. The skip connection in the UNet architecture concatenates features from both encoder and decoder paths to extract multi-contextual information from image data. The multi-scaled features play an essential role in brain tumor segmentation. However, the limited use of features can degrade the performance of the UNet approach for segmentation. In this paper, we propose…
Faculty of Computer Science, AGH University of Krakow（计算机科学系，克拉科夫AGH大学）；Department of Informatics, Universitas Pembangunan Nasional Veteran Yogyakarta（信息系，全国 veterans 大学 Yogya 市）
Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust（阿什福德和圣彼得医院 NHS 基金会信托）；University of Lincoln（林肯大学）
In this paper we propose a 2D deep residual Unet with 104 convolutional layers (DR-Unet104) for lesion segmentation in brain MRIs. We make multiple additions to the Unet architecture, including adding the 'bottleneck' residual block to the Unet encoder and adding dropout after each convolution block stack. We verified the effect of introducing the regularisation of dropout with small rate (e.g. 0.2) on the architecture, and found a dropout of 0.2 improved the overall performance compared to no dropout, or a dropout of 0.5. We evaluated the proposed architecture as part of the Multimodal Brain …
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 …
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…
Squeeze Excitation Embedded Attention UNet for Brain Tumor Segmentation
School of Electronics Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology（韦洛尔理工大学电子工程学院）；Centre for Advanced Data Science, Vellore Institute of Technology（韦洛尔理工大学高级数据科学中心）
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。
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…
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…
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…
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）
Background and objective: Parotid gland tumors account for approximately 2% to 10% of head and neck tumors. Preoperative tumor localization, differential diagnosis, and subsequent selection of appropriate treatment for parotid gland tumors are critical. However, the relative rarity of these tumors and the highly dispersed tissue types have left an unmet need for a subtle differential diagnosis of such neoplastic lesions based on preoperative radiomics. Recently, deep learning methods have developed rapidly, especially Transformer beats the traditional convolutional neural network in computer v…
Hybrid Multihead Attentive Unet-3D for Brain Tumor Segmentation
University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore（拉合尔工程技术大学）；School of Interdisciplinary Engineering and Sciences, National University of Sciences and Technology（国家科技大学跨学科工程与科学学院）
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. BarcelonaTech（加泰罗尼亚理工大学·巴塞罗那理工）
Automation of brain tumor segmentation in 3D magnetic resonance images (MRIs) is key to assess the diagnostic and treatment of the disease. In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown improved results in the task. However, high memory consumption is still a problem in 3D-CNNs. Moreover, most methods do not include uncertainty information, which is especially critical in medical diagnosis. This work studies 3D encoder-decoder architectures trained with patch-based techniques to reduce memory consumption and decrease the effect of unbalanced data. The different trained model…
Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation of MRI from Pre- and Mid-radiotherapy with Pre-training, Data Augmentation and Dual Flow UNet
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Sichuan Cancer Hospital & Institute, Sichuan Cancer Center（四川省肿瘤医院·研究所（四川省癌症防治中心））
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…
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）
Vision Transformers (ViT)s have recently become popular due to their outstanding modeling capabilities, in particular for capturing long-range information, and scalability to dataset and model sizes which has led to state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision and medical image analysis tasks. In this work, we introduce a unified framework consisting of two architectures, dubbed UNetFormer, with a 3D Swin Transformer-based encoder and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and transformer-based decoders. In the proposed model, the encoder is linked to the decoder via skip connections at…
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…
In this paper, we present UNet++, a new, more powerful architecture for medical image segmentation. Our architecture is essentially a deeply-supervised encoder-decoder network where the encoder and decoder sub-networks are connected through a series of nested, dense skip pathways. The re-designed skip pathways aim at reducing the semantic gap between the feature maps of the encoder and decoder sub-networks. We argue that the optimizer would deal with an easier learning task when the feature maps from the decoder and encoder networks are semantically similar. We have evaluated UNet++ in compari…
An Ensemble Approach for Brain Tumor Segmentation and Synthesis
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗G.艾伦计算机科学学院）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学生物工程系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学机械工程系）；Watauga High School（沃托加高中）；Department of Neurological Surgery, University of Washington（华盛顿大学神经外科系）
Shanghai University（上海大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Liver tumor segmentation in CT images is a critical step in the diagnosis, surgical planning and postoperative evaluation of liver disease. An automatic liver and tumor segmentation method can greatly relieve physicians of the heavy workload of examining CT images and better improve the accuracy of diagnosis. In the last few decades, many modifications based on U-Net model have been proposed in the literature. However, there are relatively few improvements for the advanced UNet++ model. In our paper, we propose an encoding feature supervised UNet++(ES-UNet++) and apply it to the liver and tumo…
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras（马德拉斯印度理工学院）
In this paper we propose a fully automatic 2-stage cascaded approach for segmentation of liver and its tumors in CT (Computed Tomography) images using densely connected fully convolutional neural network (DenseNet). We independently train liver and tumor segmentation models and cascade them for a combined segmentation of the liver and its tumor. The first stage involves segmentation of liver and the second stage uses the first stage's segmentation results for localization of liver and henceforth tumor segmentations inside liver region. The liver model was trained on the down-sampled axial slic…
Dino-NestedUNet: Unlocking Foundation Vision Encoders for Pathology Tumor Bulk Segmentation via Dense Decoding
Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, OH, USA（病理学系，医学学院，俄亥俄州立大学韦克斯纳医学中心，哥伦布，OH，USA）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA（生物医学工程系，俄亥俄州立大学，哥伦布，OH，USA）
Automatic segmentation of liver and its tumors is an essential step for extracting quantitative imaging biomarkers for accurate tumor detection, diagnosis, prognosis and assessment of tumor response to treatment. MICCAI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge (LiTS) provides a common platform for comparing different automatic algorithms on contrast-enhanced abdominal CT images in tasks including 1) liver segmentation, 2) liver tumor segmentation, and 3) tumor burden estimation. We participate this challenge by developing a hierarchical framework based on deep fully convolutional-deconvolutiona…
Yokohama City University Medical Center（横滨市立大学医学中心）
We present a fully automatic method employing convolutional neural networks based on the 2D U-net architecture and random forest classifier to solve the automatic liver lesion segmentation problem of the ISBI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge (LiTS). In order to constrain the ROI in which the tumors could be located, a liver segmentation is performed first. For the organ segmentation, an ensemble of convolutional networks is trained to segment a liver using a set of 179 liver CT datasets from liver surgery planning. Inside of the liver ROI a neural network, trained using 127 challenge tr…
In this paper, we propose a bottleneck supervised (BS) U-Net model for liver and tumor segmentation. Our main contributions are: first, we propose a variation of the original U-Net that incorporates dense modules, inception modules and dilated convolution in the encoding path; second, we propose a bottleneck supervised (BS) U-Net that contains an encoding U-Net and a segmentation U-Net. To train the BS U-Net, the encoding U-Net is first trained to get encodings of the label maps that contain the anatomical information (shape and location). Subsequently, this information is used to guide the tr…
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…
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））
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Imsight Medical Technology, Inc.（伊赛智能医疗科技有限公司）
Liver cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death. To assist doctors in hepatocellular carcinoma diagnosis and treatment planning, an accurate and automatic liver and tumor segmentation method is highly demanded in the clinical practice. Recently, fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs), including 2D and 3D FCNs, serve as the back-bone in many volumetric image segmentation. However, 2D convolutions can not fully leverage the spatial information along the third dimension while 3D convolutions suffer from high computational cost and GPU memory consumption. To address these issues, we …
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…
