Intelligent Assistant Diagnosis System of Osteosarcoma MRI Image Based on Transformer and Convolution in Developing Countries.

ABSTRACT

Osteosarcoma is a malignant bone tumor commonly found in adolescents or children, with high incidence and poor prognosis. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is the more common diagnostic method for osteosarcoma, has a very large number of output images with sparse valid data and may not be easily observed due to brightness and contrast problems, which in turn makes manual diagnosis of osteosarcoma MRI images difficult and increases the rate of misdiagnosis. Current image segmentation models for osteosarcoma mostly focus on convolution, whose segmentation performance is limited due to the neglect of global features. In this paper, we propose an intelligent assisted diagnosis system for osteosarcoma, which can reduce the burden of doctors in diagnosing osteosarcoma from three aspects. First, we construct a classification-image enhancement module consisting of resnet18 and DeepUPE to remove redundant images and improve image clarity, which can facilitate doctors' observation. Then, we experimentally compare the performance of serial, parallel, and hybrid fusion transformer and convolution, and propose a Double U-shaped visual transformer with convolution (DUconViT) for automatic segmentation of osteosarcoma to assist doctors' diagnosis. This experiment utilizes more than 80,000 osteosarcoma MRI images from three hospitals in China. The results show that DUconViT can better segment osteosarcoma with DSC 2.6% and 1.8% higher than Unet and Unet++, respectively. Finally, we propose the pixel point quantification method to calculate the area of osteosarcoma, which provides more reference basis for doctors' diagnosis.