MWSR-YLCA: Improved YOLOv7 Embedded with Attention Mechanism for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Detection from MR Images

Abstract

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a malignant tumor, and early diagnosis and timely treatment are important for NPC patients. Accurate and reliable detection of NPC lesions in magnetic resonance (MR) images is very helpful for the disease diagnosis. However, recent deep learning methods need to be improved for NPC detection in MR images. Because NPC tumors are invasive and usually small in size, it is difficult to distinguish NPC tumors from the closely connected surrounding tissues in a huge and complex background. In this paper, we propose an automatic detection method, named MWSR-YLCA, to accurately detect NPC lesions in MR images. Specifically, we design two modules, the multi-window settings resampling (MWSR) module and an improved YOLOv7 embedded with a coordinate attention mechanism (YLCA) module, to detect NPC lesions more accurately. First, the MWSR generates a pseudo-color version of MR images based on a multi-window resampling method, which preserves richer information. Subsequently, the YLCA detects the NPC lesion areas more accurately by constructing a novel network based on an improved YOLOv7 framework embedded with the coordinate attention mechanism. The proposed method was validated on an MR image set of 800 NPC patients and obtained 80.1% mAP detection performance with only 4694 data samples. The experimental results show that the proposed MWSR-YLCA method can perform high-accuracy detection of NPC lesions and has superior performance.