Deep Learning Framework for Liver Tumor Segmentation

INTRODUCTION: Segregating hepatic tumors from the liver in computed tomography (CT) scans is vital in hepatic surgery planning. Extracting liver tumors in CT images is complex due to the low contrast between the malignant and healthy tissues and the hazy boundaries in CT images. Moreover, manually detecting hepatic tumors from CT images is complicated, time-consuming, and needs clinical expertise. OBJECTIVES: An automated liver and hepatic malignancies segmentation is essential to improve surgery planning, therapy, and follow-up evaluation. Therefore, this study demonstrates the creation of an intuitive approach for segmenting tumors from the liver in CT scans. METHODS: The proposed framework uses residual UNet (ResUNet) architecture and local region-based segmentation. The algorithm begins by segmenting the liver, followed by malignancies within the liver envelope. First, ResUNet trained on labeled CT images predicts the coarse liver pixels. Further, the region-level segmentation helps determine the tumor and improves the overall segmentation map. The model is tested on a public 3D-IRCADb dataset. RESULTS: Two metrics, namely dice coefficient and volumetric overlap error (VOE), were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. ResUNet model achieved dice of 0.97 and 0.96 in segmenting liver and tumor, respectively. The value of VOE is also reduced to 1.90 and 0.615 for liver and tumor segmentation. CONCLUSION: The proposed ResUNet model performs better than existing methods in the literature. Since the proposed model is built using U-Net, the model ensures quality and precise dimensions of the output.