UDBRNet: A novel uncertainty driven boundary refined network for organ at risk segmentation

Organ segmentation has become a preliminary task for computer-aided intervention, diagnosis, radiation therapy, and critical robotic surgery. Automatic organ segmentation from medical images is a challenging task due to the inconsistent shape and size of different organs. Besides this, low contrast at the edges of organs due to similar types of tissue confuses the network's ability to segment the contour of organs properly. In this paper, we propose a novel convolution neural network based uncertainty-driven boundary-refined segmentation network (UDBRNet) that segments the organs from CT images. The CT images are segmented first and produce multiple segmentation masks from multi-line segmentation decoder. Uncertain regions are identified from multiple masks and the boundaries of the organs are refined based on uncertainty data. Our method achieves remarkable performance, boasting dice accuracies of 0.80, 0.95, 0.92, and 0.94 for Esophagus, Heart, Trachea, and Aorta respectively on the SegThor dataset, and 0.71, 0.89, 0.85, 0.97, and 0.97 for Esophagus, Spinal Cord, Heart, Left-Lung, and Right-Lung respectively on the LCTSC dataset. These results demonstrate the superiority of our uncertainty-driven boundary refinement technique over state-of-the-art segmentation networks such as UNet, Attention UNet, FC-denseNet, BASNet, UNet++, R2UNet, TransUNet, and DS-TransUNet. UDBRNet presents a promising network for more precise organ segmentation, particularly in challenging, uncertain conditions. The source code of our proposed method will be available at https://github.com/riadhassan/UDBRNet.