XR-MSF-Unet: Automatic Segmentation Model for COVID-19 Lung CT Images

Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic has threatened the human being. The automatic and accurate segmentation for the infected area of the COVID-19 CT images can help doctors to make correct diagnosis and treatment in time. However, it is very challenging to achieve perfect segmentation due to the diffuse infections of the COVID-19 to the patient lungs and irregular shapes of the infected areas and very similar infected areas to other lung tissues. To tackle these challenges, the XR-MSF-Unet model is proposed in this paper for segmenting the COVID-19 lung CT images of patients. The XR (X ResNet) convolution module is proposed in this model to replace the two-layer convolution operations of U-Net, so as to extract more informative features for achieving good segmentation results by multiple branches of XR. The plug and play attention mechanism module MSF (multi-scale features fusion module) is proposed in XR-MSF-Unet to fuse multi-scale features from different scales of reception fields, global, local and spatial features of CT images, so as to strengthen the detail segmentation effect of the model. Extensive experiments on the public COVID-19 CT images demonstrate that the proposed XR module can strengthen the capability of the XR-MSF-Unet model to extract effective features, and the MSF module plus XR module can effectively improve the segmentation capability of the XR-MSF-Unet model for the infected areas of the COVID-19 lung CT images. The proposed XR-MSF-Unet model obtains good segmentation results. Its segmentation perfor-mance is superior to that of the original U-Net model by 3.21, 5.96, 1.22 and 4.83 percentage points in terms of Dice, IOU, F1-Score and Sensitivity, and it defeats other same type of models, realizing automatic segmentation to the COVID-19 lung CT images.

Keywords

• |covid-19|ct image segmentation|u-net|xr module|msf module