Deep multi-scale feature fusion for pancreas segmentation from CT images

Purpose: Pancreas segmentation from computed tomography (CT) images is an important step in surgical procedures such as cancer detection and radiation treatment. While manual segmentation is time-consuming and operator-dependent, current computer-assisted segmentation methods are facing challenges posed by varying shapes and sizes. To address these challenges, this paper presents a multi-scale feature fusion (MsFF) model for accurate pancreas segmentation from CT images. Methods: The proposed MsFF is built upon the well-recognized encoder–decoder framework. Firstly, in the encoder stage, the squeeze-and-excitation module is incorporated to enhance the learning of features by exploiting channel-wise independence. Secondly, a hierarchical fusion module is introduced to better utilize both low-level and high-level features to retain boundary information and make final predictions. Results: The proposed MsFF is evaluated on the NIH pancreas dataset and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, by achieving a mean of 87.26% and 22.67% under the Dice Sorensen Coefficient and Volumetric Overlap Error, respectively. Conclusion: The experimental results confirm that the incorporation of squeeze-and-excitation and hierarchical fusion modules contributes to a net gain in the performance of our proposed MsFF.