A hybrid network integrating convolution and transformer for thymoma segmentation

作     者：Jingyuan Li Wenfang Sun Xiulong Feng Karen Mvon Deneen Wen Wang Guangbin Cui Yi Zhang Jingyuan Li;Wenfang Sun;Xiulong Feng;Karen M. von Deneen;Wen Wang;Guangbin Cui;Yi Zhang

作者机构：Center for Brain ImagingSchool of Life Science and TechnologyXidian UniversityXi'anShaanxi 710126China International Joint Research Center for Advanced Medical Imaging and Intelligent Diagnosis and Treatment&Xi'an Key Laboratory of Intelligent Sensing and Regulation of trans-Scale Life InformationSchool of Life Science and TechnologyXidian UniversityXi'anShaanxi 710126China School of Aerospace Science and TechnologyXidian UniversityXi'anShaanxi 710126China Department of RadiologyTangdu HospitalFourth Military Medical UniversityNo.4 Xinsi RoadXi'anShaanxi 710038China 

出 版 物：《Intelligent Medicine》 (智慧医学（英文）)

年 卷 期：2023年第3卷第3期

页      面：164-172页

核心收录：

学科分类：0710[理学-生物学] 1002[医学-临床医学] 1001[医学-基础医学(可授医学、理学学位)] 100214[医学-肿瘤学] 10[医学] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.82172023) the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi (Grant Nos.2022JC-44 and 2022JQ-622) the National Clinical Research Center for Digestive Diseases (Grant No.2015BAI13B07) the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (Grant Nos.Y1AA3009 to P.M.,D.T.,N.D.V.,and G.J.W.). 

主　　题：Semantic segmentation Convolution neural network Transformer Attention mechanism Thymoma 

摘      要：Background Manual segmentation of thymoma is an onerous,labor-intensive,and subjective task for radiologists.Accordingly,the development of an automatic and efficient method for thymoma segmentation can be valuable for the early detection and diagnosis of this malignancy.Methods Three hundred and ten subjects were enrolled in this retrospective study and all underwent CECT scans.All the scans were manually labeled by four experienced radiologists.The successful application of convolution neural networks(CNNs)and Transformer in computer vision led us to propose a hybrid CNN–Transformer architecture,named transformer attention Net(TA-Net),that would allow the utilization of both local information from CNN features and the global information encoded by Transformers.U-Net was used as the basic structure and Transformers were inserted into convolution blocks in the encoder.In addition,attention gates were embedded in skip connections to highlight salient features.Comparison of the accuracy,intersection over Union(IoU),Dice score,and Boundary F1 contour matching score(BFScore)between the predicted segmentation and the manual labels were utilized to evaluate segmentation performance.Results For thymoma segmentation using TA-Net,the accuracy,Dice score,IoU,and BFScore were 92.49%,89.92%,83.80%,and 0.8945,respectively,and no significant differences were detected among tumor types and enhanced phases.Our proposed method achieved the best performance when compared with state-of-the-art methods.Conclusion The proposed method,which combines CNNs with Transformer,achives outstanding performance in thymoma segmentation compared with previous methods.TA-Net may provide consistent and reproducible delineation,thereby assisting radiologists in clinical applications.