Squeeze-and-Excitation Encoder-Decoder Network for Kidney and Kidney Tumor Segmentation in CT images

Jianhui Wen, Zhaopei Li, Zhiqiang Shen, Yaoyong Zheng, Shaohua Zheng

Keywords: Kidney tumor segmentation, Squeeze-and-excitation network, U-Net.

Abstract: Kidney cancer is one of the top ten cancers in the world, and its incidence is still increasing. Early detection and accurate treatment are the most effective control methods. The precise and automatic segmentation of kidney tumors in computed tomography (CT) is an important prerequisite for medical methods such as pathological localization and radiotherapy planning, However, due to the large differences in the shape, size, and location of kidney tumors, the accurate and automatic segmentation of kidney tumors still encounter great challenges. Recently, U-Net and its variants have been adopted to solve medical image segmentation problems. Although these methods achieved favorable performance, the long-range dependencies of feature maps learned by convolutional neural network (CNN) are overlooked, which leaves room for further improvement. In this paper, we propose an squeeze-and-excitation encoder-decoder network, named SeResUNet, for kidney and kidney tumor segmentation. SeResUNet is an U-Net-like architecture. The encoder of SeResUNet contains a SeResNet to learns high-level semantic features and model the long-range dependencies among different channels of the learned feature maps. The decoder is the same as the vanilla U-Net. The encoder and decoder are connected by the skip connections for feature concatenation. We used the kidney and kidney tumor segmentation 2021 dataset to evaluate the proposed method. The dice scores of SeResUNet in kidney, masses, and tumor are 91.6%, 58.8%, 54.16%, respectively.