LRENet: a location-related enhancement network for liver lesions in CT images

Abstract Objective . Liver cancer is a major global health problem expected to increase by more than 55% by 2040. Accurate segmentation of liver tumors from computed tomography (CT) images is essential for diagnosis and treatment planning. However, this task is challenging due to the variations in liver size, the low contrast between tumor and normal tissue, and the noise in the images. Approach. In this study, we propose a novel method called location-related enhancement network (LRENet) which can enhance the contrast of liver lesions in CT images and facilitate their segmentation. LRENet consists of two steps: (1) locating the lesions and the surrounding tissues using a morphological approach and (2) enhancing the lesions and smoothing the other regions using a new loss function. Main results. We evaluated LRENet on two public datasets (LiTS and 3Dircadb01) and one dataset collected from a collaborative hospital (Liver cancer dateset), and compared it with state-of-the-art methods regarding several metrics. The results of the experiments showed that our proposed method outperformed the compared methods on three datasets in several metrics. We also trained the Swin-Transformer network on the enhanced datasets and showed that our method could improve the segmentation performance of both liver and lesions. Significance. Our method has potential applications in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning, as it can provide more reliable and informative CT images of liver tumors.