RMCNet: A Liver Cancer Segmentation Network Based on 3D Multi-Scale Convolution, Attention, and Residual Path

Abdominal CT images are important clues for diagnosing liver cancer lesions. However, liver cancer presents challenges such as significant differences in tumor size, shape, and location, which can affect segmentation accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose an end-to-end 3D segmentation algorithm, RMCNet. In the shallow encoding part of RMCNet, we incorporated a 3D multiscale convolution (3D-Multiscale Convolution) module to more effectively extract tumors of varying sizes. Moreover, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) is used in the encoding part to help the model focus on both the shape and location of tumors. Additionally, a residual path is introduced in each encoding layer to further enrich the extracted feature maps. Our method achieved DSC scores of 76.56% and 72.96%, JCC scores of 75.82% and 71.25%, HD values of 11.07 mm and 17.06 mm, and ASD values of 2.54 mm and 10.51 mm on the MICCAI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation public dataset and the 3Dircadb-01 public dataset, respectively. Compared to other methods, RMCNet demonstrates superior segmentation performance and stronger generalization capability.