Automatic segmentation of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in CT images using dual attention and edge detection

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a malignant tumor with a high incidence. Accurate segmentation of the tumor region in Computed Tomography (CT) images of NPC is the key to NPC treatment. However, the features of uneven grayscale values and hazy boundaries of NPC regions make accurate NPC segmentation particularly challenging. To address these problems, we propose an accurate and effective NPC segmentation method using Dual Attention and Edge Detection Convolutional Neural Network (DAED-Net). Firstly, we combine a 2.5D convolutional neural network with UNet++ and propose a new backbone called Dual-dimension Dense UNet (DD-UNet), which can extract more beneficial features from 3D images. Secondly, a Dual Attention Module (DAM) is proposed to help the model better segment the target region of NPC by efficiently collecting spatial and channel attention information from feature maps. Moreover, an Edge Detection Module (EDM) is introduced in the network to enhance the segmentation of the target contours. Finally, we evaluate the proposed DAED-Net on the public MICCAI 2019 StructSeg NPC dataset from different perspectives. Numerical and visual results show that the proposed method outperforms nine state-of-the-art segmentation methods and yields more accurate NPC segmentation results.