A dense R‐CNN multi‐target instance segmentation model and its application in medical image processing. Issue 9 (19th April 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Yang, Ruiping; Yu, Jiguo; Yin, Jian; Liu, Kun; Xu, Shaohua
• Is Part Of: IET image processing. Volume 16:Issue 9(2022)
• Page Start: 2495
• Page End: 2505
• Publication Date: 2022-04-19
• Subjects: Image processing -- Periodicals; 621.36705
• DOI: 10.1049/ipr2.12503
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1751-9659

Abstract

Abstract: In the medical image analysis domain, medical image segmentation has a significant impact on the quantitative analysis of organ or tissue function, as the first and critical component of diagnosis and treatment pipeline. In this paper, a dense R‐CNN segmentation model based on dual‐attention are proposed for medical images multi‐target instance segmentation. The model combines channel and spatial attention mechanism to extract image features and fuse multi‐scale feature information hierarchically. It combines up‐sampling strategies such as dilated convolution and bilinear interpolation to strengthen the distinguishability between multi‐target instances and pixel‐level features in other regions. The multi‐target detection mechanism of R‐CNN is combined with the multi‐scale feature extraction and fusion ability of dense convolution network. In the encoding stage, the multi‐scale hybrid bottleneck module and deformable convolution are introduced to extract more accurate structural feature information and increase the receptive‐field. In the decoding stage, the bilinear interpolation and the adaptive hierarchical fusion mechanism are used to strengthen the distinguishability between the target region and other regions, and improve the accuracy of instance segmentation. Taking cardiac MRI segmentation as an example, the left and right ventricles, and left ventricular myocardium are selected as segmentation targets. The pixel accuracy is 90.82%, the class pixel accuracy is 87.91%, the mean intersection‐over‐union is 81.52%, the Dice coefficient is 89.82%, and Hausdorff distance is 9.2, which is improved compared with other methods. It verifies the accuracy and applicability of the proposed method for multi‐target instance segmentation of medical images.