Three-Dimensional Liver Image Segmentation Using Generative Adversarial Networks Based on Feature Restoration

Medical imaging provides a powerful tool for medical diagnosis. In the process of computer-aided diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer based on medical imaging, accurate segmentation of liver region from abdominal CT images is an important step. However, due to defects of liver tissue and limitations of CT imaging procession, the gray level of liver region in CT image is heterogeneous, and the boundary between the liver and those of adjacent tissues and organs is blurred, which makes the liver segmentation an extremely difficult task. In this study, aiming at solving the problem of low segmentation accuracy of the original 3D U-Net network, an improved network based on the three-dimensional (3D) U-Net, is proposed. Moreover, in order to solve the problem of insufficient training data caused by the difficulty of acquiring labeled 3D data, an improved 3D U-Net network is embedded into the framework of generative adversarial networks (GAN), which establishes a semi-supervised 3D liver segmentation optimization algorithm. Finally, considering the problem of poor quality of 3D abdominal fake images generated by utilizing random noise as input, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) based on feature restoration method is designed to generate more realistic fake images. By testing the proposed algorithm on the LiTS-2017 and KiTS19 dataset, experimental results show that the proposed semi-supervised 3D liver segmentation method can greatly improve the segmentation performance of liver, with a Dice score of 0.9424 outperforming other methods.