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Deep learning-based segmentation models often struggle to achieve optimal performance when encountering new, unseen semantic classes. Their effectiveness hinges on vast amounts of annotated data and high computational resources for training. However, a promising solution to mitigate these challenges is the adoption of few-shot segmentation (FSS) networks, which can train models with reduced annotated data. The inherent complexity of medical images limits the applicability of FSS in medical imaging, despite its potential. Recent advancements in self-supervised label-efficient FSS models have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in medical image segmentation tasks. This paper presents a novel FSS architecture that enhances segmentation accuracy by utilising fewer features than existing methodologies. Additionally, this paper proposes a novel self-supervised learning approach that utilises supervoxel and augmented superpixel images to further enhance segmentation accuracy. This paper assesses the efficacy of the proposed model on two different datasets: abdominal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cardiac MRI. The proposed model achieves a mean dice score and mean intersection over union of 81.62% and 70.38% for abdominal images, and 79.38% and 65.23% for cardiac images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Purpose Methods Results Conclusions Multi‐organ segmentation is a critical task in medical imaging, with wide‐ranging applications in both clinical practice and research. Accurate delineation of organs from high‐resolution 3D medical images, such as CT scans, is essential for radiation therapy planning, enhancing treatment outcomes, and minimizing radiation toxicity risks. Additionally, it plays a pivotal role in quantitative image analysis, supporting various medical research studies. Despite its significance, manual segmentation of multiple organs from 3D images is labor‐intensive and prone to low reproducibility due to high interoperator variability. Recent advancements in deep learning have led to several automated segmentation methods, yet many rely heavily on labeled data and human anatomy expertise.In this study, our primary objective is to address the limitations of existing semi‐supervised learning (SSL) methods for abdominal multi‐organ segmentation. We aim to introduce a novel SSL approach that leverages unlabeled data to enhance the performance of deep neural networks in segmenting abdominal organs. Specifically, we propose a method that incorporates a redrawing network into the segmentation process to correct errors and improve accuracy.Our proposed method comprises three interconnected neural networks: a segmentation network for image segmentation, a teacher network for consistency regularization, and a redrawing network for object redrawing. During training, the segmentation network undergoes two rounds of optimization: basic training and readjustment. We adopt the Mean‐Teacher model as our baseline SSL approach, utilizing labeled and unlabeled data. However, recognizing significant errors in abdominal multi‐organ segmentation using this method alone, we introduce the redrawing network to generate redrawn images based on CT scans, preserving original anatomical information. Our approach is grounded in the generative process hypothesis, encompassing segmentation, drawing, and assembling stages. Correct segmentation is crucial for generating accurate images. In the basic training phase, the segmentation network is trained using both labeled and unlabeled data, incorporating consistency learning to ensure consistent predictions before and after perturbations. The readjustment phase focuses on reducing segmentation errors by optimizing the segmentation network parameters based on the differences between redrawn and original CT images.We evaluated our method using two publicly available datasets: the beyond the cranial vault (BTCV) segmentation dataset (training: 44, validation: 6) and the abdominal multi‐organ segmentation (AMOS) challenge 2022 dataset (training:138, validation:16). Our results were compared with state‐of‐the‐art SSL methods, including MT and dual‐task consistency (DTC), using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) as an accuracy metric. On both datasets, our proposed SSL method consistently outperformed other methods, including supervised learning, achieving superior segmentation performance for various abdominal organs. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, even with a limited number of labeled data.Our novel semi‐supervised learning approach for abdominal multi‐organ segmentation addresses the challenges associated with this task. By integrating a redrawing network and leveraging unlabeled data, we achieve remarkable improvements in accuracy. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing SSL and supervised learning methods. This approach holds great promise in enhancing the precision and efficiency of multi‐organ segmentation in medical imaging applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic segmentation of cardiac computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a pivotal role in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. In this study, we propose an efficient network based on the multi-scale, multi-head self-attention (MSMHSA) mechanism. The incorporation of this mechanism enables us to achieve larger receptive fields, facilitating the accurate segmentation of whole heart structures in both CT and MRI images. Within this network, features extracted from the shallow feature extraction network undergo a MHSA mechanism that closely aligns with human vision, resulting in the extraction of contextual semantic information more comprehensively and accurately. To improve the precision of cardiac substructure segmentation across varying sizes, our proposed method introduces three MHSA networks at distinct scales. This approach allows for fine-tuning the accuracy of micro-object segmentation by adapting the size of the segmented images. The efficacy of our method is rigorously validated on the Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation (MM-WHS) Challenge 2017 dataset, demonstrating competitive results and the accurate segmentation of seven cardiac substructures in both cardiac CT and MRI images. Through comparative experiments with advanced transformer-based models, our study provides compelling evidence that despite the remarkable achievements of transformer-based models, the fusion of CNN models and self-attention remains a simple yet highly effective approach for dual-modality whole heart segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Rapid and accurate segmentation of tumor regions from rectal cancer images can better understand the patient’s lesions and surrounding tissues, providing more effective auxiliary diagnostic information. However, cutting rectal tumors with deep learning still cannot be compared with manual segmentation, and a major obstacle to cutting rectal tumors with deep learning is the lack of high-quality data sets. OBJECTIVE: We propose to use our Re-segmentation Method to manually correct the model segmentation area and put it into training and training ideas. The data set has been made publicly available. Methods: A total of 354 rectal cancer CT images and 308 rectal region images labeled by experts from Jiangxi Cancer Hospital were included in the data set. Six network architectures are used to train the data set, and the region predicted by the model is manually revised and then put into training to improve the ability of model segmentation and then perform performance measurement. RESULTS: In this study, we use the Resegmentation Method for various popular network architectures. CONCLUSION: By comparing the evaluation indicators before and after using the Re-segmentation Method, we prove that our proposed Re-segmentation Method can further improve the performance of the rectal cancer image segmentation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important areas in medical image analysis is segmentation, in which raw image data is partitioned into structured and meaningful regions to gain further insights. By using Deep Neural Networks (DNN), AI-based automated segmentation algorithms can potentially assist physicians with more effective imaging-based diagnoses. However, since it is difficult to acquire high-quality ground truths for medical images and DNN hyperparameters require significant manual tuning, the results by DNN-based medical models might be limited. A potential solution is to combine multiple DNN models using ensemble learning. We propose a two-layer ensemble of deep learning models in which the prediction of each training image pixel made by each model in the first layer is used as the augmented data of the training image for the second layer of the ensemble. The prediction of the second layer is then combined by using a weight-based scheme which is found by solving linear regression problems. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first work which proposes a two-layer ensemble of deep learning models with an augmented data technique in medical image segmentation. Experiments conducted on five different medical image datasets for diverse segmentation tasks show that proposed method achieves better results in terms of several performance metrics compared to some well-known benchmark algorithms. Our proposed two-layer ensemble of deep learning models for segmentation of medical images shows effectiveness compared to several benchmark algorithms. The research can be expanded in several directions like image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deep learning algorithms have achieved remarkable results in medical image segmentation. These networks with an enormous number of parameters often encounter challenges in handling image boundaries and details, which may result in suboptimal segmentation results. To solve the problem, we develop atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and combine it with the squeeze‐and‐excitation block (SE block), as well as present the PS module, which employs a broader and multiscale receptive field at the network's bottom to obtain more detailed semantic information. We also propose the local guided block (LG block) and also its combination with the SE block to form the LS block, which can obtain more abundant local features in the feature map, so that more edge information can be retained in each down sampling process, thereby improving the performance of boundary segmentation. We propose PLU‐Net and integrate our PS module and LS block into U‐Net. We put our PLU‐Net to the test on three benchmark datasets, and the results show that by fewer parameters and FLOPs, it outperforms on medical semantic segmentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diverse shapes and scales, complicated backgrounds, blurred boundaries, and similar appearances challenge the current organ segmentation methods in medical scene images. It is difficult to acquire satisfactory performance to directly extend the object segmentation methods in the natural scene images to the medical scene images. In this paper, we propose a discriminant feature pyramid (DFPNet) network for organ segmentation in the original medical images, which consists of two sub-networks: the feature steered network and the border network. To be specific, the feature steered network takes a top-down step-wise manner to extract abundant context information, which is conducive to suppressing the cluttered background and perceiving the scale variation of objects. The border network utilizes a bottom-up step-wise manner to optimize the boundary feature map, which aims at distinguishing adjacent edge features with similar appearances but diverse labels. A series of experiments were conducted on three publicly available medical datasets (i.e., LUNA 16, RIM-ONE-R1, and VNC datasets) to evaluate the validity and generalization of the proposed DFPNet. Experimental results indicate that our network achieves superior performance in terms of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, F-Score, Jaccard index, and Hausdorff distance. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Xie-Xiwang/DFPNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical imaging serves as a crucial tool in current cancer diagnosis. However, the quality of medical images is often compromised to minimize the potential risks associated with patient image acquisition. Computer-aided diagnosis systems have made significant advancements in recent years. These systems utilize computer algorithms to identify abnormal features in medical images, assisting radiologists in improving diagnostic accuracy and achieving consistency in image and disease interpretation. Importantly, the quality of medical images, as the target data, determines the achievable level of performance by artificial intelligence algorithms. However, the pixel value range of medical images differs from that of the digital images typically processed via artificial intelligence algorithms, and blindly incorporating such data for training can result in suboptimal algorithm performance. In this study, we propose a medical image-enhancement scheme that integrates generic digital image processing and medical image processing modules. This scheme aims to enhance medical image data by endowing them with high-contrast and smooth characteristics. We conducted experimental testing to demonstrate the effectiveness of this scheme in improving the performance of a medical image segmentation algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning recently achieved advancement in the segmentation of medical images. In this regard, U-Net is the most predominant deep neural network, and its architecture is the most prevalent in the medical imaging society. Experiments conducted on difficult datasets directed us to the conclusion that the traditional U-Net framework appears to be deficient in certain respects, despite its overall excellence in segmenting multimodal medical images. Therefore, we propose several modifications to the existing cutting-edge U-Net model. The technical approach involves applying a Multi-Dimensional U-Convolutional Neural Network to achieve accurate segmentation of multimodal biomedical images, enhancing precision and comprehensiveness in identifying and analyzing structures across diverse imaging modalities. As a result of the enhancements, we propose a novel framework called Multi-Dimensional U-Convolutional Neural Network (MDU-CNN) as a potential successor to the U-Net framework. On a large set of multimodal medical images, we compared our proposed framework, MDU-CNN, to the classical U-Net. There have been small changes in the case of perfect images, and a huge improvement is obtained in the case of difficult images. We tested our model on five distinct datasets, each of which presented unique challenges, and found that it has obtained a better performance of 1.32%, 5.19%, 4.50%, 10.23% and 0.87%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Convolution operator-based neural networks have shown great success in medical image segmentation over the past decade. The U-shaped network with a codec structure is one of the most widely used models. Transformer, a technology used in natural language processing, can capture long-distance dependencies and has been applied in Vision Transformer to achieve state-of-the-art performance on image classification tasks. Recently, researchers have extended transformer to medical image segmentation tasks, resulting in good models. Methods: This review comprises publications selected through a Web of Science search. We focused on papers published since 2018 that applied the transformer architecture to medical image segmentation. We conducted a systematic analysis of these studies and summarized the results. Results: To better comprehend the benefits of convolutional neural networks and transformers, the construction of the codec and transformer modules is first explained. Second, the medical image segmentation model based on transformer is summarized. The typically used assessment markers for medical image segmentation tasks are then listed. Finally, a large number of medical segmentation datasets are described. Conclusion: Even if there is a pure transformer model without any convolution operator, the sample size of medical picture segmentation still restricts the growth of the transformer, even though it can be relieved by a pretraining model. More often than not, researchers are still designing models using transformer and convolution operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dental caries is one of the most prevalent and chronic diseases worldwide. Dental X-ray radiography is considered a standard tool and a valuable resource for radiologists to identify dental diseases and problems that are hard to recognize by visual inspection alone. However, the available dental panoramic image datasets are extremely limited and only include a small number of images. U-Net is one of the deep learning networks that are showing promising performance in medical image segmentation. In this work, different U-Net models are applied to dental panoramic X-ray images to detect caries lesions. The Detection, Numbering, and Segmentation Panoramic Images (DNS) dataset, which includes 1500 panoramic X-ray images obtained from Ivisionlab, is used in this experiment. The major objective of this work is to extend the DNS Panoramic Images dataset by detecting the cavities in the panoramic image and generating the binary ground truth of this image to use as the ground truth for the evaluation of models. These ground truths are revised by experts to ensure their robustness and correctness. Firstly, we expand the Panoramic Images (DNS) dataset by detecting the cavities in the panoramic images and generating the images' binary ground truth. Secondly, we apply U-Net, U-Net++ and U-Net3+ to the expanded DNS dataset to learn the hierarchical features and to enhance the cavity boundary. The results show that U-Net3+ outperforms the other versions of U-Net with 95% in testing accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation of pneumonia on lung radiographs is vital for the precise diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. It enables healthcare professionals to locate and quantify the extent of infection, guide treatment decisions, and improve patient care. One of the most-employed approaches to effectively segment pneumonia in lung radiographs is to treat it as an optimization task. By formulating the problem in this manner, it is possible to use the interesting capabilities of metaheuristic methods to determine the optimal segmentation solution. Although these methods produce interesting results, they frequently produce suboptimal solutions owing to the lack of exploration of the search space. In this paper, a new segmentation method for segmenting pneumonia in lung radiographs is introduced. The algorithm is based on the jellyfish search optimizer (JSO), which is characterized by its excellent global exploration capability and robustness. This method uses an energy curve based on cross-entropy as a cost function that penalizes misclassified pixels more heavily, leading to a sharper focus on regions where segmentation errors occur. This is particularly important because it allows for the accurate delineation of objects or regions of interest. To validate our proposed approach, we conducted extensive testing on the most widely available datasets. The results of our method were compared with those obtained using other established techniques. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the other methods at levels 8, 16, and 32, with a difference of more than 10%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation requires large amounts of annotated data. However, collecting massive datasets with annotations is difficult since they are expensive and labor‐intensive. The unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for image segmentation is a promising approach to address the label‐scare problem on the target domain, which enables the trained model on the source labeled domain to be adaptive to the target domain. The adversarial‐based methods encourage extracting the domain‐invariant features by training a domain discriminator to mitigate the domain gap. Existing UDA segmentation methods fail to obtain satisfied segmentation results as they only consider the global knowledge of output space while neglecting the local information of feature space. In this paper, a fusing feature and output (FFO) space method is proposed for UDA, which in the context of medical image segmentation. The proposed model is learned by training a more powerful domain discriminator, which considers features extracted from both feature space and output space. Extensive experiments carried out on several medical image datasets show the adaptation effectiveness of our approach in improving the segmentation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing medical image processing models based on Transformers primarily rely on self-attention mechanisms to capture short-range and long-range visual dependencies. However, this approach has limitations in modeling the global context of full-resolution images, resulting in the loss of significant details. In order to address these issues, we propose an Extensible Attentional Self-learning Transformer (EAST) architecture for medical image segmentation. In EAST, tokenized images are input into an extensible attention module, enabling the training of multi-scale representations that effectively capture both fine-grained local interactions and coarse-grained global relationships. This allows for more comprehensive learning of semantic information. The obtained features are then passed through a self-learning module, further refining the representations of different samples to generate a more accurate feature map. To handle high-resolution images, the EAST architecture utilizes a U-shaped structure and skip connections for sequential processing of extensible attention feature maps. Experimental results on the Synapse dataset and ACDC dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our EAST architecture compared to other methods. Additionally, the EAST model is capable of capturing more detailed information, leading to precise localization of structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: Authors are encouraged to provide a concise description of the specific application or a potential application of the work. This section is not mandatory. Skin melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of cancer worldwide, demands precise diagnosis to mitigate cancer-related mortality. While histopathological examination, characterized by its cost-effectiveness and efficiency, remains the primary diagnostic approach, the development of an accurate detection system is pressing due to melanoma's varying sizes, shapes, and indistinct boundaries shared with normal tissues. To address the efficient segmentation of skin melanoma, we propose an innovative hybrid neural network approach in this study. Initially, a fuzzy neural network is constructed using fuzzy logic to preprocess medical images, supplemented by wavelet transformation for image enhancement. Subsequently, the Swin Transformer V2 and ResNet50 networks are introduced to parallelly extract features and apply them to the task of skin melanoma segmentation. Extensive experimental comparisons are conducted with other classic and advanced medical segmentation algorithms on publicly available skin datasets, namely ISIC 2017 and ISIC 2018. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms the optimal algorithms by 1.3% in the Dice coefficient and 1.3% in accuracy on the ISIC 2018 dataset. The evaluation metrics indicate the effectiveness of the constructed fuzzy block in identifying uncertain lesion boundaries, while the Transformer–CNN branch adeptly extracts global features while accurately capturing underlying details. Additionally, we successfully apply our method to colon polyp segmentation tasks with similar indistinct boundaries, achieving remarkable segmentation outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the limitations of convolution kernel, the traditional image segmentation network is not sufficient to obtain the context information, but the image segmentation task is very dependent on the context information. Transformer's linear input can just get enough context information. In this paper, we propose a transformer segmentation network hyperfusion transformer based on a pyramid structure. First, the model divides the single-scale coding form into several-different-scale coding forms, and then fuses the decoding results. Second, in order to ensure the specificity of the output characteristics of each branch, we orthogonalize the results of a variety of different scales. By orthogonalizing in pairs, we can ensure that the results obtained by different branches are not completely similar to a certain extent, and reduce the redundancy of branch information. On the two datasets, the method in this paper surpasses a variety of classical models under multiple evaluation indexes, confirming that it is an effective segmentation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few-shot learning is attracting more researchers due to its outstanding ability to find unseen classes with less data. Meanwhile, we noticed that medical data is difficult to collect and label, but there is a major need for higher accuracy in either organ segmentation or disease classification. Therefore, we propose a few-shot learning model with a Siamese core, the Siamese few-shot network (SFN) to improve medical image segmentation. To the beset of our knowledge, SFN is the first model to introduce few-shot learning combined with the Siamese idea to medical image segmentation. Furthermore, we also design a grid attention(GA) module to locally focus semantic information, especially in medical images. The results prove that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art model on abdominal organ segmentation for CT and MRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical imaging and information management systems require transmission and storage of medical images over the Internet. Many reversible information hiding schemes for image have been proposed to ensure security and availability. In order to avoid the risk of medical information leakage and the medical image distortion, a reversible information hiding scheme based on interpolation and histogram shift for medical images has been proposed in this paper. The proposed adaptive interpolation between neighbor pixels (AIA) technique is used to obtain seed and non-seed pixels, which ensures the reversibility of the scheme while balancing the embedding capacity and the quality of marked image. Then, the image is divided into the region of interest (ROI) and the region of non-interest (NROI). Sensitive information such as electronic patient records (EPR) and electronic signatures of medical images are embedded as secret information. In the ROI, the corresponding bit histogram shift repeated embedding method (CBHSR) is adopted for embedding information to effectively avoid the problem of image distortion caused by histogram stretching. Experimental results show that algorithm not only has high embedding capacity, but also keeps the peak signal-to-noise ratio above 50dB, visual information fidelity and structural similarity above 0.99, which has good subjective and objective image quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis and therapy systems, yet still faces many challenges. Building on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), medical image segmentation has achieved tremendous progress. However, owing to the locality of convolution operations, CNNs have the inherent limitation in learning global context. To address the limitation in building global context relationship from CNNs, we propose LGNet, a semantic segmentation network aiming to learn local and global features for fast and accurate medical image segmentation in this paper. Specifically, we employ a two-branch architecture consisting of convolution layers in one branch to learn local features and transformer layers in the other branch to learn global features. LGNet has two key insights: (1) We bridge two-branch to learn local and global features in an interactive way; (2) we present a novel multi-feature fusion model (MSFFM) to leverage the global contexture information from transformer and the local representational features from convolutions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art trade-off in terms of accuracy and efficiency on several medical image segmentation benchmarks including Synapse, ACDC and MOST. Specifically, LGNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance with Dice's indexes of 80.15% on Synapse, of 91.70% on ACDC, and of 95.56% on MOST. Meanwhile, the inference speed attains at 172 frames per second with 2 2 4 × 2 2 4 input resolution. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LGNet for fast and accurate for medical image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deep learning technology for clinical diagnosis has progressed considerably, and the value of medical imaging continues to increase. In the past, clinicians evaluated medical images according to their individual expertise. In contrast, the application of artificial intelligence technology for automatic analysis and diagnostic assistance to support clinicians in evaluating medical information more efficiently has become an important trend. In this study, we propose a machine learning architecture designed to segment images of retinal blood vessels based on an improved U-Net neural network model. The proposed model incorporates a residual module to extract features more effectively, and includes a full-scale skip connection to combine low level details with high-level features at different scales. The results of an experimental evaluation show that the model was able to segment images of retinal vessels accurately. The proposed method also outperformed several existing models on the benchmark datasets DRIVE and ROSE, including U-Net, ResUNet, U-Net3+, ResUNet++, and CaraNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multimodal segmentation of medical images is essential for clinical applications as it allows medical professionals to detect anomalies, monitor treatment effectiveness, and make informed therapeutic decisions. However, existing segmentation methods depend on paired images of modalities, which may not always be available in practical scenarios, thereby limiting their applicability. To address this challenge, current approaches aim to align modalities or generate missing modality images without a ground truth, which can introduce irrelevant texture details. In this paper, we propose the energy-basedsemantic augmented segmentation (ESAS) model, which employs the energy of latent semantic features from a supporting modality to enhance the segmentation performance on unpaired query modality data. The proposed ESAS model is a lightweight and efficient framework suitable for most unpaired multimodal image-learning tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our ESAS model on the MM-WHS 2017 challenge dataset, where it significantly improved Dice accuracy for cardiac segmentation on CT volumes. Our results highlight the potential of the proposed ESAS model to enhance patient outcomes in clinical settings by providing a promising approach for unpaired multimodal medical image segmentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The random-value impulse noise (RVIN) detection approach in image denoising, which is dependent on manually defined detection thresholds or local window information, does not have strong generalization performance and cannot successfully cope with damaged pictures with high noise levels. The fusion of the K-means clustering approach in the noise detection stage is reviewed in this research, and the internal relationship between the flat region and the detail area of the damaged picture is thoroughly explored to suggest an unique two-stage method for gray image denoising. Based on the concept of pixel clustering and grouping, all pixels in the damaged picture are separated into various groups based on gray distance similarity features, and the best detection threshold of each group is solved to identify the noise. In the noise reduction step, a partition decision filter based on the gray value characteristics of pixels in the flat and detail areas is given. For the noise pixels in flat and detail areas, local consensus index (LCI) weighted filter and edge direction filter are designed respectively to recover the pixels damaged by the RVIN. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed noise detection method is more than 90%, and is superior to most mainstream methods. At the same time, the proposed filtering method not only has good noise reduction and generalization performance for natural images and medical images with medium and high noise but also is superior to other advanced filtering technologies in visual effect and objective quality evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolution neural networks (CNNs) have proven to be effective clinical imaging methods. This study highlighted some of the key issues within these systems. It is difficult to train these systems in a limited clinical image databases, and many publications present strategies including such learning algorithm. Furthermore, these patterns are known for making a highly reliable prognosis. In addition, normalization of volume and losses of dice have been used effectively to accelerate and stabilize the training. Furthermore, these systems are improperly regulated, resulting in more confident ratings for correct and incorrect classification, which are inaccurate and difficult to understand. This study examines the risk assessment of Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNNs) for clinical image segmentation. Essential contributions have been made to this planned work: 1) dice loss and cross-entropy loss are compared on the basis of segment quality and uncertain assessment of FCNNs; 2) proposal for a group model for assurance measurement of full convolutional neural networks trained with dice loss and group normalization; And 3) the ability of the measured FCNs to evaluate the segment quality of the structures and to identify test examples outside the distribution. To evaluate the study’s contributions, it conducted a series of tests in three clinical image division applications such as heart, brain and prostate. The findings of the study provide significant insights into the predictive ambiguity assessment and a practical strategies for outside-distribution identification and reliable measurement in the clinical image segmentation. The approaches presented in this research significantly enhance the reliability and accuracy rating of CNNbased clinical imaging methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years, convolutional neural networks dominated the field of computer vision, not least in the medical field, where problems such as image segmentation were addressed by such networks as the U-Net. The arrival of self-attention-based networks to the field of computer vision through ViTs seems to have changed the trend of using standard convolutions. Throughout this work, we apply different architectures such as U-Net, ViTs and ConvMixer, to compare their performance on a medical semantic segmentation problem. All the models have been trained from scratch on the DRIVE dataset and evaluated on their private counterparts to assess which of the models performed better in the segmentation problem. Our major contribution is showing that the best-performing model (ConvMixer) is the one that shares the approach from the ViT (processing images as patches) while maintaining the foundational blocks (convolutions) from the U-Net. This mixture does not only produce better results ( D I C E = 0.83 ) than both ViTs ( 0.80 /0.077 for UNETR/SWIN-Unet) and the U-Net ( 0.82 ) on their own but reduces considerably the number of parameters (2.97M against 104M/27M and 31M, respectively), showing that there is no need to systematically use large models for solving image problems where smaller architectures with the optimal pieces can get better results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To solve the problem of the low segmentation accuracy of lung nodule CT images using U-Net, an improved method for segmentation of lung nodules by U-Net was proposed. Initially, the dense network connection and sawtooth expanded convolution design was added to the feature extraction part, and a local residual design was adopted in the upsampling process. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was evaluated using the LIDC-IDRI lung nodule public dataset. The results showed that the improved algorithm had 7.03%, 14.05%, and 10.43% higher performance than the U-Net segmentation algorithm under the three loss functions of DC, MIOU, and SE, and the accuracy was 2.45% higher compared with that of U-Net. Thus, the proposed method had an effective network structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone malignant tumors are metastatic and aggressive, with poor treatment outcomes and prognosis. Rapid and accurate diagnosis is crucial for limb salvage and increasing the survival rate. There is a lack of research on deep learning to segment bone malignant tumor lesions in medical images with complex backgrounds and blurred boundaries. Therefore, we propose a new intelligent auxiliary framework for the medical image segmentation of bone malignant tumor lesions, which consists of a supervised edge-attention guidance segmentation network (SEAGNET). We design a boundary key points selection module to supervise the learning of edge attention in the model to retain fine-grained edge feature information. We precisely locate malignant tumors by instance segmentation networks while extracting feature maps of tumor lesions in medical images. The rich contextual-dependent information in the feature map is captured by mixed attention to better understand the uncertainty and ambiguity of the boundary, and edge attention learning is used to guide the segmentation network to focus on the fuzzy boundary of the tumor region. We implement extensive experiments on real-world medical data to validate our model. It validates the superiority of our method over the latest segmentation methods, achieving the best performance in terms of the Dice similarity coefficient (0.967), precision (0.968), and accuracy (0.996). The results prove the important contribution of the framework in assisting doctors to improve the accuracy of diagnosis and clinical efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Rapid and accurate segmentation of medical images can provide important guidance in the early stages of life‐threatening diseases. Purpose: However, fuzzy edges and high similarity with the background in images usually cause undersegmentation or oversegmentation. To solve these problems. Methods: We propose a novel edge features‐reinforcement (EFR) module that uses relative frequency changes before and after warping images to extract edge information. Then, the EFR module leverages deep features to guide shallow features to produce a band‐shaped edge attention map for reinforcing the edge region of all channels. We also propose a multiscale context exploration (MCE) module to fuse multiscale features and to extract channel and spatial correlations, which allows a model to focus on the parts that contribute most to the final segmentation. We construct EFR‐Net by embedding EFR and MCE modules on the encoder–decoder architecture. Results: We verify EFR‐Net's performance with four medical datasets: retinal vessel segmentation dataset DRIVE, endoscopic polyp segmentation dataset CVC‐ClinicDB, dermoscopic image dataset ISIC2018, and aortic true lumen dataset Aorta‐computed tomography (CT). The proposed model achieves Dice similarity coefficients (DSCs) of 81.61%, 92.87%, 89.87%, and 96.98% on DRIVE, CVC‐ClinicDB, ISIC2018, and Aorta‐CT, respectively, which are better than those of current mainstream methods. In particular, the DSC of polyp segmentation increased by 3.87%. Conclusion: Through quantitative and qualitative research, our method is determined to surpass current mainstream segmentation methods, and EFR modules can effectively improve the edge prediction effect of color images and CT images. The proposed modules are easily embedded in other encoder–decoder architectures, which has the potential to be applied and expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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For the past several years, semantic segmentation method based on deep learning, especially Unet, have achieved tremendous success in medical image processing. The U‐shaped topology of Unet can well solve image segmentation tasks. However, due to the limitation of traditional convolution operations, Unet cannot realize global semantic information interaction. To address this problem, this paper proposes RT‐Unet, which combines the advantages of Transformer and Residual network for accurate medical segmentation. In RT‐Unet, the Residual block is taken as the image feature extraction layer to alleviate the problem of gradient degradation and obtain more effective features. Meanwhile, Skip‐Transformer is proposed, which takes Multi‐head Self‐Attention as the main algorithm framework, instead of the original Skip‐Connection layer in Unet to avoid the influence of shallow features on the network's performance. Besides, we add attention module at the decoder to reduce semantic differences. According to the experiments on MoNuSeg data set and ISBI_2018cell data set, RT‐Unet achieves better segmentation performance than other deep learning‐based algorithms. In addition, a series of further ablation experiments were conducted on Residual network and Skip‐Transformer, which verified the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image multi-object segmentation aims to accurately extract each object that is great significant for the medical image analysis. Although several methods based on deep learning have been widely developed, it is still challenging due to the similarities of different objects, the significant morphological variability, data heterogeneity, and the unbalanced distribution of samples. To address the above issues, we propose a novel Morphological Embedding Causal Constraint segmentation network (MCCSeg) for medical image multi-object segmentation. We build a hybrid CNN-Transformer encoder module to obtain local and global features. Specifically, a Causal Constraint Module (CCM) is proposed to decorrelate features by sample reweighting, which utilizes weight allocation to train the weight of training samples. The Random Fourier Features (RFF) is employed to solve nonlinear dependency problems and remove correlations between features to mitigate the influence of spurious correlations. The morphological guidance module (MG) is designed to extract the boundary as prior morphological information for enhancing feature representation, which is concatenated into the deep supervision module in the decoder for further optimizing feature extraction. The experiments demonstrate that MCCSeg outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of 3.76% and 5.41% in terms of DICE and HD95 scores on Synapse dataset, respectively. The ablation experiments further verify the effectiveness of MCCSeg in improving generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation of pneumonia on lung radiographs is vital for the precise diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. It enables healthcare professionals to locate and quantify the extent of infection, guide treatment decisions, and improve patient care. One of the most-employed approaches to effectively segment pneumonia in lung radiographs is to treat it as an optimization task. By formulating the problem in this manner, it is possible to use the interesting capabilities of metaheuristic methods to determine the optimal segmentation solution. Although these methods produce interesting results, they frequently produce suboptimal solutions owing to the lack of exploration of the search space. In this paper, a new segmentation method for segmenting pneumonia in lung radiographs is introduced. The algorithm is based on the jellyfish search optimizer (JSO), which is characterized by its excellent global exploration capability and robustness. This method uses an energy curve based on cross-entropy as a cost function that penalizes misclassified pixels more heavily, leading to a sharper focus on regions where segmentation errors occur. This is particularly important because it allows for the accurate delineation of objects or regions of interest. To validate our proposed approach, we conducted extensive testing on the most widely available datasets. The results of our method were compared with those obtained using other established techniques. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the other methods at levels 8, 16, and 32, with a difference of more than 10%.

Early accurate burn depth diagnosis is crucial for selecting the appropriate clinical intervention strategies and assessing burn patient prognosis quality. However, with limited diagnostic accuracy, the current burn depth diagnosis approach still primarily relies on the empirical subjective assessment of clinicians. With the quick development of artificial intelligence technology, integration of deep learning algorithms with image analysis technology can more accurately identify and evaluate the information in medical images. The objective of the work is to detect and classify burn area in medical images using an unsupervised deep learning algorithm. The main contribution is to developing computations using one of the deep learning algorithm. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, experiments are performed on the benchmark to evaluate system stability. The results indicate that, the proposed system is simple and suits real life applications. The system accuracy was 75%, when compared with some of the state-of-the-art techniques.

• We propose Double-branch U-Net which can deal with fine structure to remedy the shortcomings of traditional UNet. The method can extract and fuse the features of different scales. • We propose an information exchange module to constrain and normalize more parameters, which increases the effect of the model, generalizes the model and avoids over-fitting. • We designed a classification module to reject redundant output tags for the training process based on patch clipping, which improves the accuracy of the model. U-Net has achieved great success in the task of medical image segmentation. It encodes and extracts information from several convolution blocks, and then decodes the feature maps to get the segmentation results. Our experiments show that in a multi-scale medical segmentation task, excessive downsampling will cause the model to ignore the small segmentation objects and thus fail to complete the segmentation task. In this work, we propose a more complete method Double-branch U-Net (2BUNet) to solve the multi-scale organ segmentation challenge. Our model is divided into four parts: main branch, tributary branch, information exchange module and classification module. The main advantages of the new model consist of: (1) Extracting information to improve model decoding capabilities using the complete encoding structure. (2) The information exchange module is added to the main branch and tributaries to provide regularization for the model, so as to avoid the large gap between the two paths. (3) Main branch structure for extracting major features of large organ. (4) The tributary structure is used to enlarge the image to extract the microscopic characteristics of small organ. (5) A classification assistant module is proposed to increase the class constraint for the output tensor. The comparative experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances in real scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, segmentation for medical image is mainly based on fully supervised model training, which consumes a lot of time and labor for dataset labeling. To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised medical image segmentation model based on a generative adversarial network framework for automated segmentation of arteries. The network is mainly composed of two parts: a segmentation network for medical image segmentation and a discriminant network for evaluating segmentation results. In the initial stage of network training, a fully supervised training method is adopted to make the segmentation network and the discrimination network have certain segmentation and discrimination capabilities. Then a semi-supervised method is adopted to train the model, in which the discriminant network will generate pseudo-labels on the results of the segmentation for semi-supervised training of the segmentation network. The proposed method can use a small part of annotated dataset to realize the segmentation of medical images and effectively solve the problem of insufficient medical image annotation data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional network models have been widely used in image segmentation. However, there are many types of boundary contour features in medical images which seriously affect the stability and accuracy of image segmentation models, such as the ambiguity of tumors, the variability of lesions, and the weak boundaries of fine blood vessels. In this paper, in order to solve these problems we first introduce the dual-tree complex wavelet scattering transform module, and then innovatively propose a learning scattering wavelet network model. In addition, a new improved active contour loss function is further constructed to deal with complex segmentation. Finally, the equilibrium coefficient of our model is discussed. Experiments on the BraTS2020 dataset show that the LSW-Net model has improved the Dice coefficient, accuracy, and sensitivity of the classic FCN, SegNet, and At-Unet models by at least 3.51%, 2.11%, and 0.46%, respectively. In addition, the LSW-Net model still has an advantage in the average measure of Dice coefficients compared with some advanced segmentation models. Experiments on the DRIVE dataset prove that our model outperforms the other 14 algorithms in both Dice coefficient and specificity measures. In particular, the sensitivity of our model provides a 3.39% improvement when compared with the Unet model, and the model's effect is obvious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast number of image modalities available nowadays has given rise and access to a number of medical images. These images perhaps suffer issues such as low contrast, noise, ill-defined boundaries and poor visualisation. Therefore, a need for effective segmentation arises. Medical image segmentation plays a significant role in identifying a disorder, treatment planning, routine follow ups and computer-guided surgery respectively. The paper presents automatic medical image segmentation to overcome the imaging concerns and demarcate each notch & boundary in an image. The proposed algorithm identifies the existing kidney cyst precisely as they may be related to extreme disorders that may affect kidney function. The algorithm has been further tested on automatic segmentation using Genetic Algorithm, Ant Colony Optimisation and Fuzzy C Means Clustering. In terms of visualisation of valuable pathology, GA stands out and further helps in better assessment of the extent of the disease providing with better representation of the kidney cysts thereby giving a better diagnostic assurance and understanding of the nature of any disorder helping the medical practitioners as well as the patients. Experimental results on segmentation of kidney CT images conclusively demonstrate that the Genetic Algorithm is much more effective and robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the detection and segmentation of salient objects that attract the attention of human visual in images is determined by using salient object detection (SOD) techniques. As an essential computer vision problem, SOD has increasingly attracted the researchers' interest over the years. While a lot of SOD models and applications have been proposed, there is still a lack of deep understanding of the issues and achievements. A comprehensive study on the recent techniques of SOD is provided in this paper. Precisely, this paper presents a review of SOD techniques from various perspectives. Various image segmentation techniques are presented such as segmentation based on machine learning or deep learning, the second perspective concentrates on classifying them into supervised and unsupervised learning techniques and the last one based on manual approach, semi-automatic approach, and fully automatic approach and so on. Then, the paper presents a summarization of datasets used for SOD. Finally, analyses of SOD models and comparison results are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in computer-aided diagnosis procedures. Recently, U-Net is widely used in medical image segmentation. Many variants of U-Net have been proposed, which attempt to improve the network performance while keeping the U-shaped structure unchanged. However, this U-shaped structure is not necessarily optimal. In this article, the effects of different parts of the U-Net on the segmentation ability are experimentally analyzed. Then a more efficient architecture, Half-UNet, is proposed. The proposed architecture is essentially an encoder-decoder network based on the U-Net structure, in which both the encoder and decoder are simplified. The re-designed architecture takes advantage of the unification of channel numbers, full-scale feature fusion, and Ghost modules. We compared Half-UNet with U-Net and its variants across multiple medical image segmentation tasks: mammography segmentation, lung nodule segmentation in the CT images, and left ventricular MRI image segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that Half-UNet has similar segmentation accuracy compared U-Net and its variants, while the parameters and floating-point operations are reduced by 98.6 and 81.8%, respectively, compared with U-Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation is a fundamental element in Medical Image Processing (MIP) and has been extensively researched and developed to aid in clinical interpretation and utilization. This article discusses a method for segmenting abnormal masses or tumors in medical images that is both robust and effective. We suggested a method based on Active Contour (AC) and modified Level-set techniques to detect malignancies in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), mammography, and Computed Tomography (CT). To segment malignant masses, the active contour approach, the energy function, the level-set method, and the proposed F function are employed. The system was evaluated using 160 medical images from two databases, including 80 mammograms and 80 MRI brain scans. The algorithm for segmenting suspicious segments has an accuracy, recall, and precision of 96.25%, 95.60%, and 95.71%, respectively. By adding this technique into tissue imaging devices, the accuracy of diagnosing images with a relatively large volume that are evaluated fast is increased. Cost savings, time savings, and high precision are all advantages of the approach that set it apart from similar systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-modal medical image segmentation is one of the research hotspots in the field of medical image analysis. Effectively using the complementary information of different modal images to provide more information about the focus area and its surrounding area from multiple levels can improve the accuracy of clinical diagnosis. In order to analyze the research status and development direction of deep learning in the field of multi-modal medical image segmentation, this paper sorted and studied the segmentation methods in this field in recent years. Based on the analysis of their characteristics and existing problems, this paper prospected the future research direction, which could help relevant researchers comprehensively and quickly understand the research status, existing problems and future research direction in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of a Phase Field method for medical image segmentation is proposed in this paper. The Allen-Cahn equation, a mathematical model equation, is used in this method. The Finite Difference method is used for numerical discretization of model equations and semi-algebraic equations integrated over time using the second-order Runge-Kutta method. Numerical algorithms are implemented into computer programming using the serial and parallel C programming language based on GPU CUDA. Based on image segmentation calculations, the Phase Field method has high accuracy. It is indicated by the Jaccard Index and Dice Similarity values that are close to one. The range of Jaccard Index values is 0.859 - 0.952, while the Dice Similarity value range is 0.926 - 0.976. In addition, it is shown that parallel programming with GPU CUDA can accelerate 45.72 times compared to serial programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thresholding based on information divergence is an important technique for image segmentation. It has been applied successfully in many fields because of its excellent performance. Due to its nonsymmetrical characteristic, the traditional information divergence has some shortcomings in measuring the similarity between different probability distributions. Compared with the traditional information divergence, the Jensen-Shannon divergence is more accurate in measuring the similarity of probability distribution. Based on this, a Jensen-Shannon divergence thresholding method for image segmentation is proposed. In the proposed method, the Jensen-Shannon divergence of the segmented image is constructed according to the gray level distribution information of the image pixels, and the optimal segmentation threshold is calculated according to the principle of minimum divergence. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the segmentation of non-destructive testing images and medical images, and compared with the traditional divergence threshold segmentation method and some classical methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves good segmentation results, and the computation time is less than 1 seconds for images with size less than 576×768. Therefore, the proposed method has a good application prospect and promotion value in scenarios with high real-time performance requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, deep learning, especially convolutional neural networks, has achieved the remarkable results in natural image classification and segmentation. At the same time, in the field of medical image segmentation, researchers use deep learning techniques for tasks such as tumor segmentation, cell segmentation, and organ segmentation. Automatic tumor segmentation plays an important role in radiotherapy and clinical practice and is the basis for the implementation of follow-up treatment programs. This paper reviews the tumor segmentation methods based on deep learning in recent years. We first introduce the common medical image types and the evaluation criteria of segmentation results in tumor segmentation. Then, we review the tumor segmentation methods based on deep learning from technique view and tumor view, respectively. The technique view reviews the researches from the architecture of the deep learning and the tumor view reviews from the type of tumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]