Reliable segmentation of multiple lesions from medical images.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Focusing on the complicated pathological features, such as blurred boundaries, severe scale differences between symptoms, and background noise interference, we aim to enhance the reliability of multiple lesions joint segmentation from medical images. PURPOSE: Propose a novel reliable multi-scale wavelet-enhanced transformer network, which can provide accurate segmentation results with reliability assessment. METHODS: Focusing on enhancing the model's capability to capture intricate pathological features in medical images, this work introduces a novel segmentation backbone. The backbone integrates a wavelet-enhanced feature extractor network and incorporates a multi-scale transformer module developed within the scope of this work. Simultaneously, to enhance the reliability of segmentation outcomes, a novel uncertainty segmentation head is proposed. This segmentation head is rooted in the SL, contributing to the generation of final segmentation results along with an associated overall uncertainty evaluation score map. RESULTS: Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the public database of AI-Challenge 2018 for retinal edema lesions segmentation and the segmentation of Thoracic Organs at Risk in CT images. The experimental results highlight the superior segmentation accuracy and heightened reliability achieved by the proposed method in comparison to other state-of-the-art segmentation approaches. CONCLUSIONS: Unlike previous segmentation methods, the proposed approach can produce reliable segmentation results with an estimated uncertainty and higher accuracy, enhancing the overall reliability of the model. The code will be release on https//github.com/LooKing9218/ReMultiSeg.