Multi-phase features interaction transformer network for liver tumor segmentation and microvascular invasion assessment in contrast-enhanced CT
Precise segmentation of liver tumors from computed tomography (CT) scans is a prerequisite step in various clinical applications. Multi-phase CT imaging enhances tumor characterization, thereby assisting radiologists in accurate identification. However, existing automatic liver tumor segmentation mo...
Uloženo v:
| Vydáno v: | Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE Ročník 21; číslo 4; s. 5735 - 5761 |
|---|---|
| Hlavní autoři: | , , , , , , , |
| Médium: | Journal Article |
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Vydáno: |
United States
AIMS Press
24.04.2024
|
| Témata: | |
| ISSN: | 1551-0018, 1551-0018 |
| On-line přístup: | Získat plný text |
| Tagy: |
Přidat tag
Žádné tagy, Buďte první, kdo vytvoří štítek k tomuto záznamu!
|
| Shrnutí: | Precise segmentation of liver tumors from computed tomography (CT) scans is a prerequisite step in various clinical applications. Multi-phase CT imaging enhances tumor characterization, thereby assisting radiologists in accurate identification. However, existing automatic liver tumor segmentation models did not fully exploit multi-phase information and lacked the capability to capture global information. In this study, we developed a pioneering multi-phase feature interaction Transformer network (MI-TransSeg) for accurate liver tumor segmentation and a subsequent microvascular invasion (MVI) assessment in contrast-enhanced CT images. In the proposed network, an efficient multi-phase features interaction module was introduced to enable bi-directional feature interaction among multiple phases, thus maximally exploiting the available multi-phase information. To enhance the model's capability to extract global information, a hierarchical transformer-based encoder and decoder architecture was designed. Importantly, we devised a multi-resolution scales feature aggregation strategy (MSFA) to optimize the parameters and performance of the proposed model. Subsequent to segmentation, the liver tumor masks generated by MI-TransSeg were applied to extract radiomic features for the clinical applications of the MVI assessment. With Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, a clinical multi-phase contrast-enhanced CT abdominal dataset was collected that included 164 patients with liver tumors. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed MI-TransSeg was superior to various state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we found that the tumor mask predicted by our method showed promising potential in the assessment of microvascular invasion. In conclusion, MI-TransSeg presents an innovative paradigm for the segmentation of complex liver tumors, thus underscoring the significance of multi-phase CT data exploitation. The proposed MI-TransSeg network has the potential to assist radiologists in diagnosing liver tumors and assessing microvascular invasion. |
|---|---|
| Bibliografie: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 1551-0018 1551-0018 |
| DOI: | 10.3934/mbe.2024253 |