Laser & Optoelectronics Progress, Volume. 59, Issue 4, 0417003(2022)

SAU-Net: Multiorgan Image Segmentation Method Improved Using Squeeze Attention Mechanism

Guogang Cao1、*, Hongdong Mao1, Shu Zhang1, Ying Chen1, and Cuixia Dai2
Author Affiliations
  • 1School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai 201418, China
  • 2College of Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai 201418, China
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    Radiotherapy is a common treatment for tumors. To accurately control the radiation dose distribution and reduce the damage caused by radiation to normal tissues and organs in radiotherapy, organs at risk must be delineated precisely. In this study, a novel automatic segmentation method for organs in head and neck, named SAU-Net, was proposed, the architecture of which is based on the three-dimensional (3D) U-Net with residual connections. Nonlocal spatial attention implemented using the squeeze and attention (SA) module was introduced to solve the problem of unbalanced segmentation accuracy caused by massive differences in organs' volumes. This introduction increased the ability to aggregate multiscale contextual information by encoding global features. To avoid the stacking of excess local information by extra convolution operations and reduce the number of parameters, the model reduced the number of convolution kernels. The performance of the model was evaluated using the dice score, and SAU-Net achieved 13.7% and 8.2% higher segmentation accuracy than 3D U-Net and 3D residual U-Net (ResU-Net), respectively. Moreover, the proposed model achieved of an inference time 73% faster than that achieved by FocusNetv2. Thus, SAU-Net delineates organs at risk in the head and neck faster than AnatomyNet and more accurately than FocusNetv2.

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    Guogang Cao, Hongdong Mao, Shu Zhang, Ying Chen, Cuixia Dai. SAU-Net: Multiorgan Image Segmentation Method Improved Using Squeeze Attention Mechanism[J]. Laser & Optoelectronics Progress, 2022, 59(4): 0417003

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    Paper Information

    Category: Medical Optics and Biotechnology

    Received: Jul. 18, 2021

    Accepted: Sep. 13, 2021

    Published Online: Feb. 15, 2022

    The Author Email: Cao Guogang (guogangcao@163.com)

    DOI:10.3788/LOP202259.0417003

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