Automatic Liver Tumor Segmentation on Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI Using 4D Information: Deep Learning Model Based on 3D Convolution and Convolutional LSTM

Objective: Accurate segmentation of liver tumors, which could help physicians make appropriate treatment decisions and assess the effectiveness of surgical treatment, is crucial for the clinical diagnosis of liver cancer. In this study, we propose a 4-dimensional (4D) deep learning model based on 3D convolution and convolutional long short-term memory (C-LSTM) for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) lesion segmentation.

Methods: The proposed deep learning model utilizes 4D information on dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images to assist liver tumor segmentation. Specifically, a shallow U-net based 3D CNN module was designed to extract 3D spatial domain features from each DCE phase, followed by a 4-layer C-LSTM network module for time domain information exploitation. The combined information of multi-phase DCE images and the manner by which tissue imaging features change on multi-contrast images allow the network to more effectively learn the characteristics of HCC, resulting in better segmentation performance.

Results: The proposed model achieved a Dice score of 0.825± 0.077, a Hausdorff distance of 12.84± 8.14 mm, and a volume similarity of 0.891± 0.080 for liver tumor segmentation, which outperformed the 3D U-net model, RA-UNet model and other models in the ablation study in both internal and external test sets. Moreover, the performance of the proposed model is comparable to the nnU-Net model, which showed state-of-the-art performance in many segmentation tasks, with significantly reduced prediction time.

Conclusion: The proposed 3D convolution and C-LSTM based model can achieve accurate segmentation of HCC lesions.