Topological structure and global features enhanced graph reasoning model for non-small cell lung cancer segmentation from CT

Abstract Objective. Accurate and automated segmentation of lung tumors from computed tomography (CT) images is critical yet challenging. Lung tumors are of various sizes and locations and have indistinct boundaries adjacent to other normal tissues. Approach. We propose a new segmentation model that can integrate the topological structure and global features of image region nodes to address the challenges. Firstly, we construct a weighted graph with image region nodes. The graph topology reflects the complex spatial relationships among these nodes, and each node has its specific attributes. Secondly, we propose a node-wise topological feature learning module based on a new graph convolutional autoencoder (GCA). Meanwhile, a node information supplementation (GNIS) module is established by integrating specific features of each node extracted by a convolutional neural network (CNN) into each encoding layer of GCA. Afterwards, we construct a global feature extraction model based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to encode the features learnt from all the image region nodes which are crucial complementary information for tumor segmentation. Main results. Ablation study results over the public lung tumor segmentation dataset demonstrate the contributions of our major technical innovations. Compared with other segmentation methods, our new model improves the segmentation performance and has generalization ability on different 3D image segmentation backbones. Our model achieved Dice of 0.7827, IoU of 0.6981, and HD of 32.1743 mm on the public dataset 2018 Medical Segmentation Decathlon challenge, and Dice of 0.7004, IoU of 0.5704 and HD of 64.4661 mm on lung tumor dataset from Shandong Cancer Hospital. Significance . The novel model improves automated lung tumor segmentation performance especially the challenging and complex cases using topological structure and global features of image region nodes. It is of great potential to apply the model to other CT segmentation tasks.