Volume Segmentation of Liver and Liver Tumor with Fusion of Multi-Branch Features

The overcomplete convolutional structure for biological images and volume segmentation is an excellent solution to the problem in which traditional codec methods cannot accurately segment the boundary regions. Although such methods perform well, the drawback that convolutional operations do not effectively learn global and remote semantic information interactions must be addressed. Accordingly, a new image segmentation network, KTU-Net, is proposed for the medical image segmentation of liver tumors. The network structure constitutes three branches: 1)Kite-Net, which is an overcomplete convolutional network that learns to capture input details and precise edges; 2)U-Net, which learns high-level features; 3)Transformer, which learns sequential representations of input bodies and efficiently captures global multiscale information. KTU-Net is designed for both early and late fusion, and a hybrid loss function is adopted to guide network training to achieve increased stability. From extensive experimental results regarding the LiTS liver tumor segmentation dataset, KTU-Net achieves higher or similar segmentation accuracy than other advanced 3D medical image segmentation methods such as KiU-Net, TransBTS, and UNETR. Fusing the three branching features, the average Dice scores of liver tumors are improved by 0.7% and 2.1%, achieving increased quality of features learned by the network and more accurate segmentation results of liver tumors, thus providing a reliable basis for doctors to perform precise liver tumor cell assessments and treatment plans.