DCED: Deformable Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Network for Inflamed Appendix Segmentation and Classification from CT Images
Acute appendicitis (AA) is one of the most prevalent surgical acute abdominal condition diseases. The recognition and segmentation of the inflamed appendix are important for AA diagnosis. However, it is a challenging task to find and segment the inflamed appendix from computed tomography (CT) images due to the varying sizes and shapes of different appendices and blurred borders with nearby tissues. To the best of our knowledge, the general expert segmentation model suffers due to the characterization of the inflamed appendix. Thus, we propose a deformable convolutional encoder-decoder network (DCED) for better recognition and segmentation of the inflamed appendix. The network consists of an encoder, a bottleneck, and a decoder. The encoder is composed of several convolutional neural network (CNN) layers to capture the local structural information. The bottleneck based on a vision transformer (ViT) focuses on the region of interest (ROI) using the global attention mechanism. The encoder and bottleneck modules effectively combine the local and global information of input data to locate the inflamed appendix. The decoder based on a deformable convolutional network (DCN) learns the varied boundary information, which helps to improve the accuracy of boundary segmentation. Extensive experimental results on a real-world AA dataset show that the proposed method yields the best average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 71.29\% and average Hausdorff Distance 95% (HD95) of 12.38 mm in comparison to state-of-the-art segmentation methods.