A 3d U-Net Based on Early Fusion Model: Improvement, Comparative Analysis With State-of-the-Art Models and Fine-Tuning

Abstract

Multi-organ segmentation is the process of identifying and separating multiple organs in medical images. This segmentation allows for the detection of structural abnormalities by examining the morphological structure of organs. Carrying out the process quickly and precisely has become an important issue in today's conditions. In recent years, researchers have used various technologies for the automatic segmentation of multiple organs. In this study, improvements were made to increase the multi-organ segmentation performance of the 3D U-Net based fusion model combining HSV and grayscale color spaces and compared with state-of-the-art models. Training and testing were performed on the MICCAI 2015 dataset published at Vanderbilt University, which contains 3D abdominal CT images in NIfTI format. The model's performance was evaluated using the Dice similarity coefficient. In the tests, the liver organ showed the highest Dice score. Considering the average Dice score of all organs, and comparing it with other models, it has been observed that the fusion approach model yields promising results.