BGRA-Net: Boundary-Guided and Region-Aware Convolutional Neural Network for the Segmentation of Breast Ultrasound Images
Xiang Zhang, Xuanya Li, Kai Ming Hu, Xieping Gao · 2021 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) · 2021
In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network based on boundary-guided and region-aware (BGRA-Net) for breast tumor segmentation in ultrasound images. In particular, in the encoding stage, we propose a boundary-guided module (BGM) to guide the learning of boundary features in the decoding stage by explicitly strengthening the extracted boundary information. Meanwhile, in the decoding stage, we propose a region-aware module (RAM) to integrate different levels of detailed and semantic features to improve the comprehensive representation of tumor regional features. Besides, a scale-adaptive module (SAM) is further proposed to capture the characteristics of tumors with different sizes between the encoding and decoding stages. To evaluate the effectiveness of our BGRA-Net, we conduct extensive experiments on the UDIAT dataset and compare it with eight state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that our BGRA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and can achieve accurate segmentation of breast tumors with ambiguous boundaries.