Exploiting Multi-Decision and Deep Refinement for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (MDR-Net) for ultrasound image segmentation by exploiting multi-decision and deep refinement of the target. Our MDR-Net consists of two main parts, i.e., a multi-decision module (MDM) and a deep refinement module (DRM). Specifically, the MDM effectively addresses the issue of inconspicuous target regions in ultrasound images by combining multi-scale features and multi-receptive field self-attention to enhance the discriminative representation of features and diagnose feature points multiple times. In addition, to alleviate the problem of blurred boundaries and severe speckle noise, the DRM progressively fuses multi-scale features and makes the fused features interact with higher-level features to refine the target details step by step. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available datasets, namely BUSI and UDIAT. We achieve a Dice of 0.8265 and 0.8827 on the two datasets, which are at least 2% and 1.24% higher than other state-of-the-art ultrasound image segmentation methods.