Liver vessel segmentation based on inter-scale V-Net

Segmentation and visualization of liver vessel is a key task in preoperative planning and computer-aided diagnosis of liver diseases. Due to the irregular structure of liver vessel, accurate liver vessel segmentation is difficult. This paper proposes a method of liver vessel segmentation based on an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jinzhu Yang, Meihan Fu, Ying Hu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: AIMS Press 2021-05-01
Series:Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.aimspress.com/article/doi/10.3934/mbe.2021217?viewType=HTML
Description
Summary:Segmentation and visualization of liver vessel is a key task in preoperative planning and computer-aided diagnosis of liver diseases. Due to the irregular structure of liver vessel, accurate liver vessel segmentation is difficult. This paper proposes a method of liver vessel segmentation based on an improved V-Net network. Firstly, a dilated convolution is introduced into the network to make the network can still enlarge the receptive field without reducing down-sampling and save detailed spatial information. Secondly, a 3D deep supervision mechanism is introduced into the network to speed up the convergence of the network and help the network learn semantic features better. Finally, inter-scale dense connections are designed in the decoder of the network to prevent the loss of high-level semantic information during the decoding process and effectively integrate multi-scale feature information. The public datasets 3Dircadb were used to perform liver vessel segmentation experiments. The average dice and sensitivity of the proposed method reached 71.6 and 75.4%, respectively, which are higher than those of the original network. The experimental results show that the improved V-Net network can automatically and accurately segment labeled or even other unlabeled liver vessels from the CT images.
ISSN:1551-0018