With the rapid development of network structure, convolutional neural networks (CNN) consolidated its position as a leading machine learning tool in the field of image analysis. Therefore, semantic segmentation based on CNN has also become a key high-level task in medical image understanding. This paper reviews the research progress on CNN-based semantic segmentation in the field of medical image. A variety of classical semantic segmentation methods are reviewed, whose contributions and significance are highlighted. On this basis, their applications in the segmentation of some major physiological and pathological anatomical structures are further summarized and discussed. Finally, the open challenges and potential development direction of semantic segmentation based on CNN in the area of medical image are discussed.
Glioma is a primary brain tumor with high incidence rate. High-grade gliomas (HGG) are those with the highest degree of malignancy and the lowest degree of survival. Surgical resection and postoperative adjuvant chemoradiotherapy are often used in clinical treatment, so accurate segmentation of tumor-related areas is of great significance for the treatment of patients. In order to improve the segmentation accuracy of HGG, this paper proposes a multi-modal glioma semantic segmentation network with multi-scale feature extraction and multi-attention fusion mechanism. The main contributions are, (1) Multi-scale residual structures were used to extract features from multi-modal gliomas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); (2) Two types of attention modules were used for features aggregating in channel and spatial; (3) In order to improve the segmentation performance of the whole network, the branch classifier was constructed using ensemble learning strategy to adjust and correct the classification results of the backbone classifier. The experimental results showed that the Dice coefficient values of the proposed segmentation method in this article were 0.909 7, 0.877 3 and 0.839 6 for whole tumor, tumor core and enhanced tumor respectively, and the segmentation results had good boundary continuity in the three-dimensional direction. Therefore, the proposed semantic segmentation network has good segmentation performance for high-grade gliomas lesions.