An automated two-stage approach to kidney and tumor segmentation in CT imaging

BACKGROUND: The incidence of kidney tumors is progressively increasing each year. The precision of segmentation for kidney tumors is crucial for diagnosis and treatment. OBJECTIVE: To enhance accuracy and reduce manual involvement, propose a deep learning-based method for the automatic segmentation of kidneys and kidney tumors in CT images. METHODS: The proposed method comprises two parts: object detection and segmentation. We first use a model to detect the position of the kidney, then narrow the segmentation range, and finally use an attentional recurrent residual convolutional network for segmentation. RESULTS: Our model achieved a kidney dice score of 0.951 and a tumor dice score of 0.895 on the KiTS19 dataset. Experimental results show that our model significantly improves the accuracy of kidney and kidney tumor segmentation and outperforms other advanced methods. CONCLUSION: The proposed method provides an efficient and automatic solution for accurately segmenting kidneys and renal tumors on CT images. Additionally, this study can assist radiologists in assessing patients’ conditions and making informed treatment decisions.