A Liver Segmentation Method Based on the Fusion of VNet and WGAN

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of liver images is an essential step in liver disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognosis. In recent years, although liver segmentation methods based on 2D convolutional neural networks have achieved good results, there is still a lack of interlayer information that causes severe loss of segmentation accuracy to a certain extent. Meanwhile, making the best of high-level and low-level features more effectively in a 2D segmentation network is a challenging problem. Therefore, we designed and implemented a 2.5-dimensional convolutional neural network, VNet_WGAN, to improve the accuracy of liver segmentation. First, we chose three adjacent layers of a liver model as the input of our network and adopted two convolution kernels in series connection, which can integrate cross-sectional spatial information and interlayer information of liver models. Second, a chain residual pooling module is added to fuse multilevel feature information to optimize the skip connection. Finally, the boundary loss function in the generator is employed to compensate for the lack of marginal pixel accuracy in the Dice loss function. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on two datasets, LiTS and CHAOS. The Dice coefficients are 92% and 90%, respectively, which are better than those of the compared segmentation networks. In addition, the experimental results also show that the proposed method can reduce computational consumption while retaining higher segmentation accuracy, which is significant for liver segmentation in practice and provides a favorable reference for clinicians in liver segmentation.