Skip to main content
Log in

Medical image segmentation algorithm based on multilayer boundary perception-self attention deep learning model

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Traditional medical image segmentation methods have problems such as low segmentation accuracy and low adaptive ability. Therefore, many scholars have proposed a medical image segmentation method based on deep learning, which has achieved good results in the field of medical image segmentation. However, this type of method has the following problems in the application process: (1) Medical image segmentation target boundary positioning problem. Constrained by factors such as medical image contrast, heterogeneity, and boundary resolution, existing convolution models still cannot accurately locate boundaries. (2) Deep adaptability of deep learning network structure to medical images. Because medical images have more distinct and different feature information than natural images, the current deep learning-based medical segmentation methods have not fully considered this feature. In view of this, this paper proposes a multi-level boundary-aware RUNet segmentation model. The network structure consists of a U-Net-based segmentation network and a multi-level boundary detection network. It can solve the problem of boundary positioning. At the same time, in order to solve the problem of poor adaptability of deep learning network structures to medical images, this paper proposes to introduce a new interactive self-attention module into deep learning models. It can make the feature map get global information, and realize the effective extraction of medical image feature information. It solves the problem of weak matching between the deep learning network structure and medical images. Based on the above ideas, this paper proposes an image segmentation algorithm based on a multi-layer boundary perception-self-attention mechanism deep learning model. This method and other mainstream segmentation algorithms are used to perform experiments on related medical databases. The results show that the proposed method not only improves the segmentation effect significantly compared with traditional machine learning methods, but also improves it to a certain extent compared with other deep learning methods.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Ahmad M, Yang J, Ai D (2017) Deep-stacked auto encoder for liver segmentation. In: Chinese Conference on Image and Graphics Technologies. Springer, Singapore, pp 243–251

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bengio Y, Lamblin P, Popovici D (2007) Greedy layer-wise training of deep networks. Adv Neural Inf Proces Syst:153–160

  3. Bertels J, Eelbode T, Berman M (2019) Optimizing the dice score and Jaccard index for medical image segmentation: theory and practice. Int Conf Med Image Comput Comput-Assist Intervent:92–100

  4. Chen Y, Xu W, Zuo J, Yang K (2019) The fire recognition algorithm using dynamic feature fusion and IV-SVM classifier. Clust Comput 22(3):7665–7675

  5. Chen Y, Wang J, Xia R (2019) The visual object tracking algorithm research based on adaptive combination kernel. J Ambient Intell Humaniz Comput 10(12):4855–4867

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Chen Y, Wang J, Liu S (2019) Multiscale fast correlation filtering tracking algorithm based on a feature fusion model, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, pp. 1–16

  7. Chen X, Yao L, Zhang Y (2020) Residual attention U-Net for automated multi-class segmentation of COVID-19. Chest CT images arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.05645:1–7

  8. Chen Y, Tao J, Liu L, Xiong J, Xia R, Xie J,Yang K (2020) Research of improving semantic image segmentation based on a feature fusion model. J Ambient Intell Humaniz Comput:1–3 (online)

  9. Chen Y, Tao J, Zhang Q, Yang K, Chen X, Xiong J, Xie J (2020) Saliency detection via the improved hierarchical principal component analysis method. Wirel Commun Mob Comput 2020:1–12

  10. Cootes TF, Twining CJ, Petrovic VS, Schestowitz R, Taylor CJ (2005, September) Groupwise construction of appearance models using piece-wise affine deformations. In BMVC 5:879–888

  11. Fan DP, Zhou T, Ji GP (2020) Inf-net: automatic COVID-19 lung infection segmentation from CT images. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 39(8):2626–2637

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Fritscher KD, Peroni M, Zaffino P, Spadea MF, Schubert R, Sharp G (2014) Automatic segmentation of head and neck CT images for radiotherapy treatment planning using multiple atlases, statistical appearance models, and geodesic active contours. Med Phys 41(5):1–11

  13. Fritscher K, Magna S, Magna S (2015) Machine-learning based image segmentation using manifold learning and random patch forests. In: Imaging and computer assistance in radiation therapy (ICART) workshop, pp 1–8

  14. Gu Z, Cheng J, Fu H (2019) CE-net: context encoder network for 2D medical image segmentation. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 38(10):2281–2292

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Hancer E (2020) Artificial bee colony: theory, literature review, and application in image segmentation. In: Recent advances on memetic algorithms and its applications in image processing. Springer, Singapore, pp 47–67

  16. Hesamian MH, Jia W, He X (2019) Deep learning techniques for medical image segmentation: achievements and challenges. J Digit Imaging 32(4):582–596

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Hinton GE, Salakhutdinov RR (2006) Reducing the dimensionality of data with neural networks. science 313(5786):504–507

  18. Ibragimov B, Xing L (2017) Segmentation of organs-at-risks in head and neck CT images using convolutional neural networks. Med Phys 44(2):547–557

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Kumar V, Webb JM, Gregory A (2018) Automated and real-time segmentation of suspicious breast masses using convolutional neural network. PloS one 13(5):e0195816

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Lang I, Sklair-Levy M, Spitzer H (2016) Multi-scale texture-based level-set segmentation of breast B-mode images. Comput Biol Med (72):30–42

  21. Li Z, Liu G, Zhang D (2016) Robust single-object image segmentation based on salient transition region, Pattern recognition, no 52, p. 317–331

  22. Liao Z, Zhang R, He S, Zeng D, Wang J, Kim HJ (2019) Deep learning-based data storage for low latency in data center networks. IEEE Access 7:26411–26417

  23. Lin TY, Goyal P, Girshick R (2017) Focal loss for dense object detection,” Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision, pp 2980–2988

  24. Lu X, Ma C, Ni B, Yang X, Reid I, Yang MH (2018) Deep regression tracking with shrinkage loss. In: Proceedings of the European conference on computer vision (ECCV), pp 353–369

  25. Men K, Geng H, Cheng C, Zhong H, Huang M, Fan Y, Xiao Y (2019) More accurate and efficient segmentation of organs-at-risk in radiotherapy with convolutional neural networks cascades. Med Phys 46(1):286–292

  26. Milletari F, Navab N, Ahmadi S A (2016) V-net: Fully convolutional neural networks for volumetric medical image segmentation,” IEEE Fourth International Conference on 3D Vision, pp 565–571

  27. Olszewska JI (2015) Active contour based optical character recognition for automated scene understanding. Neurocomputing, no 161 pp 65–71

  28. Olszewska JI (2019, February) Designing transparent and autonomous intelligent vision systems. In: ICAART 2:850–856

  29. Park B, Park H, Lee SM (2019) Lung segmentation on HRCT and volumetric CT for diffuse interstitial lung disease using deep convolutional neural networks. J Digit Imaging 32(6):1019–1026

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Ramakrishnan T, Sankaragomathi B (2016) A professional analysis and evaluation of computed tomography brain tumor images using SDNN for segmentation and SOM-LS-SVM for classification. J Med Imaging Health Informat 6(6):1426–1429

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Rikitake R, Tsukada Y, Ando M (2019) Use of intensity-modulated radiation therapy for nasopharyngeal cancer in Japan: analysis using a national database. Jpn J Clin Oncol 49(7):639–645

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Rodrigues R, Braz R, Pereira M, Moutinho J, Pinheiro AM (2015) A two-step segmentation method for breast ultrasound masses based on multi-resolution analysis. Ultrasound Med Biol 41(6):1737–1748

  33. Sinha P, Tuteja M, Saxena S (2020) Medical image segmentation: hard and soft computing approaches. SN Applied Sciences 2(2):1–8

  34. Song B, Wang H, Wei R (2019) Brain tumor segmentation of magnetic resonance imaging based on improved support vector machines. J Med Imaging & Health Infor 9(5):1011–1016

  35. Sourati J, Gholipour A, Dy JG (2019) Intelligent labeling based on fisher information for medical image segmentation using deep learning. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 38(11):2642–2653

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Tang W, Zou D, Yang S (2018) DSL: automatic liver segmentation with faster R-CNN and DeepLab. In: International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks. Springer, Cham, pp 137–147

    Google Scholar 

  37. Tong N, Gou S, Yang S, Ruan D, Sheng K (2018) Fully automatic multi-organ segmentation for head and neck cancer radiotherapy using shape representation model constrained fully convolutional neural networks. Med Phys 45(10):4558–4567

  38. Tsafack N, Kengne J, Abd-El-Atty B (2020) Design and implementation of a simple dynamical 4-D chaotic circuit with applications in image encryption, Information Sciences, no 515, pp 191–217

  39. Wachinger C, Brennan M, Sharp GC (2016) Efficient descriptor-based segmentation of parotid glands with nonlocal means. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 64(7):1492–1502

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Wang Z, Wei L, Wang L (2017) Hierarchical vertex regression-based segmentation of head and neck CT images for radiotherapy planning. IEEE Trans Image Process 27(2):923–937

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  41. Wang G, Li W, Aertsen M (2019) Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networks, Neurocomputing, no 338, pp 34–45

  42. Xu Y, Wang Y, Yuan J (2019) Medical breast ultrasound image segmentation by machine learning, Ultrasonics, no 91, pp 1–9

  43. Yang F, Miao Y, Lei P (2020) Development of a fully automatic segmentation method in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging using the deep learning approach. J Med Imaging Health Informat 10(1):11–17

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Yu S, Wu S, Zhuang L (2017) Efficient segmentation of a breast in B-mode ultrasound tomography using three-dimensional GrabCut (GC3D). Sensors 17(8):1827–1841

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Zhang Y, Xiang T, Hospedales TM, Lu H (2018) Deep mutual learning. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition:4320–4328

  46. Zhang J, Wang W, Lu C (2020) Lightweight deep network for traffic sign classification. Ann Telecommun 75(7):369–379

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Zhang J, Xie Z, Sun J, Zou X, Wang J (2020) A cascaded R-CNN with multiscale attention and imbalanced samples for traffic sign detection. IEEE Access 8:29742–29754

  48. Zhou S, Nie D, Adeli E, Yin J, Lian J, Shen D (2019) High-resolution encoder–decoder networks for low-contrast medical image segmentation. IEEE Trans Image Process 29:461–475

Download references

Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61701188), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (No. 2019 M650512) and Scientific and technological innovation service capacity building—high-level discipline construction (city level).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Feng-Ping An or Jun-e Liu.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The data used to support the findings of this study are included within the paper.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

An, FP., Liu, Je. Medical image segmentation algorithm based on multilayer boundary perception-self attention deep learning model. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 15017–15039 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10515-w

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10515-w

Keywords

Navigation