Title
LMA-Net: A lesion morphology aware network for medical image segmentation towards breast tumors
Abstract
Breast tumor segmentation plays a critical role in the diagnosis and treatment of breast diseases. Current breast tumor segmentation methods are mainly deep learning (DL) based methods, which exacted the contrast information between tumors and backgrounds, and produced tumor candidates. However, all these methods were developed based on traditional standard convolutions, which may not be able to model various tumor shapes and extract pure information of tumors (the extracted information usually contain non-tumor information). Besides, the loss functions used in these methods mainly aimed to minimize the intra-class distances, while ignoring the influence of inter-class distances upon segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel lesion morphology aware network to segment breast tumors in 2D magnetic resonance images (MRI). The proposed network employs a hierarchical structure that contains two stages: breast segmentation stage and tumor segmentation stage. In the tumor segmentation stage, we devise a tumor morphology aware network to incorporate pure tumor characteristics, which facilitates contrastive information extraction. Further, we propose a hybrid intra- and inter-class distance optimization loss to supervise the network, which can minimize intra-class distances meanwhile maximizing inter-class distances, hence reducing the potential false positive/negative pixels in segmentation results. Verified on a clinical 2D MRI breast tumor dataset, our proposed method achieves eminent segmentation results and outperforms state-of-the-art methods, implying that the proposed method has a good prospect for clinical use.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.105685
Computers in Biology and Medicine
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Lesion morphology,Deep learning,Deformable convolution,Hybrid loss function,Breast tumor segmentation
Journal
147
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0010-4825
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chengtao Peng111.37
Yue Zhang201.69
You Meng300.34
S. Yang486.65
Bensheng Qiu500.34
Yuzhu Cao600.68
Jian Zheng7233.19