RA-UNet: A Hybrid Deep Attention-Aware Network to Extract Liver and Tumor in CT Scans

Automatic extraction of liver and tumor from CT volumes is a challenging task due to their heterogeneous and diffusive shapes. Recently, 2D deep convolutional neural networks have become popular in medical image segmentation tasks because of the utilization of large labeled datasets to learn hierarchical features. However, few studies investigate 3D networks for liver tumor segmentation. In this paper, we propose a 3D hybrid residual attention-aware segmentation method, i.e., RA-UNet, to precisely extract the liver region and segment tumors from the liver. The proposed network has a basic architecture as U-Net which extracts contextual information combining low-level feature maps with high-level ones. Attention residual modules are integrated so that the attention-aware features change adaptively. This is the first work that an attention residual mechanism is used to segment tumors from 3D medical volumetric images. We evaluated our framework on the public MICCAI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation dataset and tested the generalization on the 3DIRCADb dataset. The experiments show that our architecture obtains competitive results.