journal article·2025-01-16Open access

G-UNETR++: A Gradient-Enhanced Network for Accurate and Robust Liver Segmentation from Computed Tomography Images

Seungyoo Lee, Kyujin Han, Hangyeul Shin, Harin Park, Seunghyon Kim, Jeonghun Kim, Xiaopeng Yang, Jae Do Yang, Hee Chul Yu, Heecheon You

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 2

Abstract

Accurate liver segmentation from computed tomography (CT) scans is essential for liver cancer diagnosis and liver surgery planning. Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models have limited segmentation performance due to their localized receptive fields. Hybrid models incorporating CNNs and transformers that can capture long-range dependencies have shown promising performance in liver segmentation with the cost of high model complexity. Therefore, a new network architecture named G-UNETR++ is proposed to improve accuracy in liver segmentation with moderate model complexity. Two gradient-based encoders that take the second-order partial derivatives (the first two elements from the last column of the Hessian matrix of a CT scan) as inputs are proposed to learn the 3D geometric features such as the boundaries between different organs and tissues. In addition, a hybrid loss function that combines dice loss, cross-entropy loss, and Hausdorff distance loss is designed to address class imbalance and improve segmentation performance in challenging cases. The proposed method was evaluated on three public datasets, the Liver Tumor Segmentation (LiTS) dataset, the 3D Image Reconstruction for Comparison of Algorithms Database (3D-IRCADb), and the Segmentation of the Liver Competition 2007 (Sliver07) dataset, and achieved 97.38%, 97.50%, and 97.32% in terms of the dice similarity coefficient for liver segmentation on the three datasets, respectively. The proposed method outperformed the other state-of-the-art models on the three datasets, which demonstrated the strong effectiveness, robustness, and generalizability of the proposed method in liver segmentation.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Medical Image Segmentation Techniques · Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging · Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

School of Global Entrepreneurship and Information Communication Technology, Handong Global University, Pohang 37554, Republic of Korea

Department of Surgery, Jeonbuk National University Medical School and Hospital, Jeonju 54907, Republic of Korea

Research Institute of Clinical Medicine, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju 54907, Republic of Korea

Biomedical Research Institute, Jeonbuk National University Hospital, Jeonju 54907, Republic of Korea

Department of Industrial Management and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang 37673, Republic of Korea

Funding

Handong Global University Research Grants · Fund of Biomedical Research Institute, Jeonbuk National University Hospital · Mid-Career Researcher Program through the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea

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