HIMS-Net: Horizontal-vertical interaction and multiple side-outputs network for cyst segmentation in jaw images

Jaw cysts are mainly caused by abnormal tooth development, chronic oral inflammation, or jaw damage, which may lead to facial swelling, deformity, tooth loss, and other symptoms. Due to the diversity and complexity of cyst images, deep-learning algorithms still face many difficulties and challenges. In response to these problems, we present a horizontal-vertical interaction and multiple side-outputs network for cyst segmentation in jaw images. First, the horizontal-vertical interaction mechanism facilitates complex communication paths in the vertical and horizontal dimensions, and it has the ability to capture a wide range of context dependencies. Second, the feature-fused unit is introduced to adjust the network's receptive field, which enhances the ability of acquiring multi-scale context information. Third, the multiple side-outputs strategy intelligently combines feature maps to generate more accurate and detailed change maps. Finally, experiments were carried out on the self-established jaw cyst dataset and compared with different specialist physicians to evaluate its clinical usability. The research results indicate that the Matthews correlation coefficient (Mcc), Dice, and Jaccard of HIMS-Net were 93.61, 93.66 and 88.10% respectively, which may contribute to rapid and accurate diagnosis in clinical practice.