U-ConvNext: A Robust Approach to Glioma Segmentation in Intraoperative Ultrasound.
Authors
Affiliations (5)
Affiliations (5)
- Research Center for Biomedical Technologies and Robotics (RCBTR), Advanced Medical Technologies and Equipment Institute (AMTEI), Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex , Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS), Tehran, Iran.
- Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS), Tehran, Iran.
- Department of Radiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.
- Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS), Tehran, Iran. [email protected].
- Research Center for Intelligent Technologies in Medicine (RCITM), Advanced Medical Technologies and Equipment Institute (AMTEI), Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS), Tehran, Iran. [email protected].
Abstract
Intraoperative tumor imaging is critical to achieving maximal safe resection during neurosurgery, especially for low-grade glioma resection. Given the convenience of ultrasound as an intraoperative imaging modality, but also the limitations of the ultrasound modality and the time-consuming process of manual tumor segmentation, we propose a learning-based model for the accurate segmentation of low-grade gliomas in ultrasound images. We developed a novel U-net-based architecture adopting the block architecture of the ConvNext V2 model, titled U-ConvNext, which also incorporates various architectural improvements including global response normalization, fine-tuned kernel sizes, and inception layers. We also adopted the CutMix data augmentation technique for semantic segmentation, aiming for enhanced texture detection. Conformal segmentation, a novel approach to conformal prediction for binary semantic segmentation, was also developed for uncertainty quantification, providing calibrated measures of model uncertainty in a visual format. The proposed models were trained and evaluated on three subsets of images in the RESECT dataset and achieved hold-out test Dice scores of 84.63%, 74.52%, and 90.82% on the "before," "during," and "after" subsets, respectively, which indicates increases of ~ 13-31% compared to the state of the art. Furthermore, external evaluation on the ReMIND dataset indicated a robust performance (dice score of 79.17% [95% CI: 77.82-81.62] and only a moderate decline of < 3% in expected calibration error. Our approach integrates various innovations in model design, model training, and uncertainty quantification, achieving improved results on the segmentation of low-grade glioma in ultrasound images during neurosurgery.