MBANet: Multi-branch aware network for kidney ultrasound images segmentation

Due to the influence of kidney morphology, heterogeneous structure and image quality, segmenting kidney in ultrasound images is challenging. To alleviate this challenge, we proposed a novel deep neural network architecture, namely Multi-branch Aware Network (MBANet), to segment kidney accurately and robustly. MBANet mainly consists of multi-scale feature pyramid (MSFP), multi-branch encoders (MBE) and master decoder. The design of MSFP can make the network more accessible to different kinds of class details at different scales. The information exchange between MBE can reduce the loss of feature information and improve the segmentation accuracy of the network. In addition, we designed a multi-scale fusion block (MFBlock) in the MBE to further extract and fuse more refined multi-scale image information. In order to further improve the robustness of MBANet, this paper also designed a step-by-step training mechanism. We validated the proposed approach and compared to several state-of-the-art approaches on the same kidney ultrasound datasets using six quantitative metrics. The results of our method on the six indicators of pixel accuracy (PA), intersection over union (IoU), precision, recall, specificity and F1-score (F1) are 98.83%, 92.38%, 97.10%, 95.03%, 99.46% and 0.9601, respectively. Compared with the comparison method, the average values on the six indicators are improved by about 2%. The evaluation results and segmentation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the best overall performance on kidney ultrasound images segmentation.