Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Computing and Data Communication Systems (ICSCDS-2022)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP22AZ5-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-7884-7
A Dual Channel Multiscale Convolution U-Net
Methodfor Liver Tumor Segmentation from
Abdomen CT Images
2022 International Conference on Sustainable Computing and Data Communication Systems (ICSCDS) | 978-1-6654-7884-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICSCDS53736.2022.9760904
Joel Dickson Arul Lincely
Research Scholar Associate Professor
Bethlahem Institute of Engineering, Karungal, Noorul Islam University,
Tamil Nadu 629157, India Tamil Nadu, India
shabi.jasper@gmail.com arullinsely@gmail.com
Abstract- Nowadays, the automatic segmentation of liver tumor
is needed for various medical applications like pathological
detection of liver diseases, surgical planning, and postoperative
evaluation. The liver is a massive, meaty organ on the right
part of the abdomen that plays an important part in our
digestive system. Cancerous tumors in the liver can cause a
serious threat to human life. Currently, automatic liver tumor
segmentation has a lot of problems, such as complex tissues,
fusion of features of the same scale, insufficient learning of
features, and irregular shapes of tumors. Typically, more
networks are used to learn the important features, and fuse the
features of same scale between encoders and decoders. But still,
segmentation of tumor is one of the main challenges in the
liver. Besides, soft organ removal, noise removal, and edge
detection are important stages in the segmentation of liver
tumor. Aiming at these problems, this paper introduced a Dual
Channel Multiscale Convolution Unet (DCMC-Unet) to
segment the liver tumor. An Intensity based threshold method
(IBTM) is used for removing the soft organs, and Z-score
normalization is utilized to eliminate the noise. The Enhanced
sobel method (ES M) is used to enhance the local features of the
liver. Finally, the enhanced features are fed to the DCMC-
Unetmodel to segment the tumor from the liver. Experimental
analysis illustrates that the DCMC-Unet approach attains
higher segmentation results than existing models in terms of
several qualitative metrics.
Keywords: - Computed Tomography (CT), Deep Learning (DL),
Liver Tumor Segmentation, U-Net, Liver Tumor Segmentation
Challenge (LiTS).
I. INTRODUCTION
The second leading cause of death in recent years is the
Liver cancer.There will be appro ximately 830,000 deaths
world wide fro m liver cancer by 2020, an estimate report
fro m World Health Organization (WHO). An effective
diagnosis method is needed to provide accurate information
about the liver tumor during its earlier stages. Presently, the
most popular imaging method for d iagnosing the liver
cancer is Co mputed Tomography (CT) [1]. This can provide
978-1-6654-7884-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: VIT University- Chennai Campus. Downloaded on September 25,2023 at 15:20:27 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Alice Nineta
Associate Professor
Marthandam College of Engineering and Technology,
Tamil Nadu, India
alicenineta@macet.edu.in
appropriate treatment options and help clinicians diagnose
cancer with a quick assessment of surgical treatment [2].
The Liver Tu mor Seg mentation (LiTS) challenge has been
structured for automatic and manual methods since 2008
[3]. Several ensemble seg mentation algorithms, such as
region growing, adaptive thresholding, level-set, and
AdaBoost [4-5], were applied as the best method for
automatic segmentation. However, the variability of liver
lesions and the appearance of darker and brighter
surroundings, makes it difficult to design an automatic
segmentation task. In vision-based computer tasks, Deep
Learn ing (DL) techniques have made significant
contributionsin imp roving the efficiency of segmentation.
The neural network model ensembles the U-net model to
learn features automatically for liver seg mentation and
refine them within the liver bounding box fro m the acquired
data [6]. A mong these facts, segmentation techniques must
deal with several difficu lt tasks, such as blurring tumo r
boundaries, and varying volu me and shape of the tumo r
fro m patient to patient [7-9]. Therefore, further
improvement in auto mated methods is needed to accurately
segment liver tumors on CT images.
In this paper, we have introduced the DCMC-Unet method
to accurately segment the liver tu mor. Here, we utilized
fusion of mult iscale features in the similar coding layer,
which increases the accuracy and can be used to learn more
information from the CT images .
The contributions of the paper are given below:
 A DCMC-Unet is utilized to join the different scale’s
features, so more information regarding tumor are
learned.
 It also avoids feature data loss because of the fusion of
features between the encoding and decoding layers.
1624
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Computing and Data Communication Systems (ICSCDS-2022)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP22AZ5-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-7884-7

 Z score normalization is used to remove noise, and Preprocessing

Enhanced Sobel Method (ESM) is used to enhance the
local features by detecting the edge of the liver

The forthcomingpart of the paper, in wh ich section II

discusses the recent work carried out in the do main of liver - Removing soft
Noise removal
organs
tumor segmentation on CT images. The section III presents
Input Image
the proposed DCMC-UNet model and its network
architecture. Experimental results and performance analysis
are presented in section IV. Lastly, the overall conclusion is
summarized in section V.

II. RELATED WORKS

Segmentation Edge Detection

Due to deformable shapes and low tissue contrast in the DCMC-Unet

surrounding organs of CT images, author Zhang et al. [10],
introduced an region localizat ion approach for tumo r ESM

segmentation using the combination of 2D U-Net and 3D

Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) arch itecture. Then the
localized tumor area is refined using level-set method and
estimate the liver tu mor by probabilistic distribution. Hence
the two comb ined CNN networks achieves high accuracy on
LiTS-MICCAI 2017 dataset. To cover mult i-phase
informat ion, Xu et al. [11] developed an automatic
segmentation method using phase attention 2D residual
network (PA-ResSeg) model in CT images. The phase
attention involves Portal Venous phase (PV) and Arterial
phase (AT) to explo it additional features of liver tumor fo r
training purposes. PA-ResSeg model was evaluated on
MPCT-FLLs dataset and obtains robust generalization
capability. Furthermo re, Jiang et al. [12] described an
interactive method to achieve effect ive ext racted features
using Attention Mechanism and Hybrid Connection
Network (A HCNet) through long and short skip connection
for liver-tu mor segmentation. The AHCNet model emp loys
soft and hard attention mechanis m to generalize data under
various image quality conditions. Hence the model shows
accurate results on two datasets, clinical CT dataset and
3Dircadb. However, these models still needs improvement
on high variability of location, lo w accuracy, volume shape,
fail to separate the neighbouring tissues, inter-tumor
intensity, and tumor shape variations. To assess the CT
volume, Tran et al. [13], developed U-Net based n-fold
network model (Un-Net model) to attend last features of
convolution units as skip connections for liver seg mentation
in CT images. Also, it employs dilated convolution to
enhance lesion and liver seg mentation results. However,
these techniques are suffered fro m imbalanced data between
foreground and background class, small Region of Interest
(RoI), large nu mber of redundant informat ion and burr
boundary. Among these issues, several techniques [10-13]
are analy zed but the liver-tu mor segmentation task still need
further improvement to obtain accurate results.
III. PROPOSED SCHEME: DCMC-UNET
The proposed efficient liver tu mor seg mentation using the
DCMC-Unet approach has preprocessing stage, edge
detection, and the segmentation stage. Fig.1 shows the liver
tumor segmentation architecture.
Segmented tumor
Figure 1: Architecture of segmentation of liver tumor
A. Preprocessing Stage
The preprocessing stage consists of two processing steps:
IBTM , and Z-score normalization method. The impo rtant
objectives in segmentation of image is to remove
unnecessary organs and noisefrom CT images. The
preprocessing method utilized in this work is aimed at
reducing unnecessary organs and to remove noise fro m CT
scan images. The following steps have been used to build
the liver tu mor segmentation process in effective and
efficient ways.
(a) Region of Interest (RoI) or Soft Organ Removal
The first stage in the preprocessing is removing soft organs
fro m the abdomen. Many organs, such as soft organs
(intestines, spleen, gallb ladder, pancreas, and stomach) can
be seen in the abdomen. IBTM is utilized to remove the soft
organs from the abdomen. The threshold values used to
eliminate the soft organs in the image, wh ich can be
determined in Eqn. (1).
(1)
where , and signifies the threshold values. Initially, the
two threshold values are selected manually ( , and are
in constant). Then, the image is split into two sets of pixels
by using the two threshold values.
Create a new image using instead of .

(b) Noise Removal

978-1-6654-7884-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE 1625

Authorized licensed use limited to: VIT University- Chennai Campus. Downloaded on September 25,2023 at 15:20:27 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Computing and Data Communication Systems (ICSCDS-2022)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP22AZ5-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-7884-7
The CT images of the liver have variance in the Hounsfield
units, which leads to the high fluctuation in the intensity of
the image. Ho wever, there is a large amount of noise in the
images obtained from any clin ic or hospital, which must be
reduced before the segmentation stage. To overcome this
problem, a normalization method is necessary to ensure that
all non-zero pixels in the image have a unit variance and
zero mean.
B. Edge Detection Stage
The de-noised image is fed to the edge to enhance the local
features by using ESM. The Sobel filter's main purpose is to
detect edges by using the Sobel operator. It generates an
image's gradient in both horizontal and vert ical dimensions
using convolutional templates.
An illustration example of Sobel
convolution kernels is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Sobel convolution kernels
When the image processing, the traditional Sobel edge
detection operator only deliberates in the 0 and 90 degrees
directions, where it can quickly notice the vertical and
horizontal edges, it ignores the information about edge in
other directions. It was enhanced to eight direct ions of 0,
135, 45, 225, 90, 270, 180, and 315 degrees based on the
Sobel operator’s detection directions, wh ich can be given by
ESM [14].
C. Segmentation Stage
The image fro m the Z-score is given to DCM C-Unet for the
segmentation of the tumor. In the existing mult iscale
feature fusion method, feature fusion is only allowed
between encoders and decoders of the similar scale that
978-1-6654-7884-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: VIT University- Chennai Campus. Downloaded on September 25,2023 at 15:20:27 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
have numerous nesting and skip connections between
decoding and encoding layers. This results in the loss of
some features and the learning of insufficient info rmation
fro m mu ltiple scales. Therefore, we present DCM C-Unet.
The U-Net convolution module is rep laced in the coding
layer by our multiscale dual-channel convolution module.
Initially, the image is led to the network. A dual channel
split convolution process takes place after the operation of
dual convolutions, and the image is enlarged using a
similar up samp ling operation, therefore the network may
learn mo re features. Next, by using max-pooling and dual
convolutions operations, the image is en larged to the
same input image size, mu lti-scaling is done between the
input image and the dual channel split convolution feature
fusion, and a residual connections are added, which is
shown in fig.2. Therefore, the DCM C-Unet can learn the
significant details of tumor by feature fusion.
256×256×64 256×256×64
128×128×128 128×128×128
64×64×256
64×64×256
32× 32×512 32× 32×512
Maxpooling
Conv 1× 1
Concatenate
Up sampling
Conv 3× 3, BN, Relu
Figure 3: Schematic of DCMC-Unet
In the decoder module, by using 4 up samp ling blocks, the
feature map is restored to a similar size as the input image.
The up sampling block contains dual convolution
operations, batch normalization layer, an up sampling layer,
and a ReLU layer. Retaining the decoding and encoding
layer skip connection aids to recover the lost feature
informat ion because of the pooling and convolution
operations. The final decoding module includes an 11
convolution operation to min imize the channel’s number
dimensionality in the feature map, increase nonlinear
mapping’s number, and to extract mo re significant
information in the network.
1626
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Computing and Data Communication Systems (ICSCDS-2022)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP22AZ5-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-7884-7

scans acquired fro m six medical centers represented in the

Nifti format. Each CT scan has a fixed image size o f
512 512 pixel resolution in the plane direction of x and y.
Also, it has a correspondent segmentation file as ground
truth, a liver segmentation file as label 1, and a lesion
segmentation file as label 2. For this experiment, the 200
acquired CT images can be splitted into training and testing
sets by 130:70.

B. Evaluati on Metrics

There are six standard qualitative metrics used to evaluate

DCMC-UNetmodel.

1) RVD:This metricsdetermines the comparative

Dual 3×3 Dual 3×3 difference between two object volumes and given it as,
convolution convolution | Pp |  | Gt |
Maxpooling RVD(Gt , Pp )  , (7)
| Gt |
Up sampling operation 2) VOE:It defines the ratio between two sets (intersection
and union) of segmentations i.e., Pp and Gt .VOE is
described as,
| Gt  Pp |

VOE Gt , Pp  1  | Gt  Pp |
, (8)
Figure 4: Dual channel multiscale convolution feature
fusion
The overfitting problem is due to the lack of data. So, to
where Pp denotes the positive prediction and Gt is the
overcome the overfitting p roblem, it is essential to select a number of ground truth.
suitable loss to guide the pixel pred iction of the network. 3) DG: It measures all the combined CT values into one.
The class imbalance problem happens between the 4) DC: It calculates the mean dice score of each CT
foreground (liver, and tumor) and background. The fig.3 volume.
illustrates the schematic of DCM C-Unet. It can be solved by 5) ASSD:It calculates the average distance between
presenting focal loss to the segmentation task. The focal boundary points of a segmented region and boundary
loss is defined by co mb ining a modulating factor to a points of a ground truth region.
parameter, and the cross-entropy loss for class balancing, 6) MSSD: It measures the maximu m distances between the
which can be determined in Eqn. (5). boundaries of the segmented regions.

(5) C. Evaluati on Results

This section contains the visual assessment findings for

(6)
where denotes the ground truth table,
signifies the calculated probability with label X=1. The
concentrating parameter regulates the rate at which simple
examples are down weighed. The stochastic gradient
descent algorithm is utilized to speed up the convergence of
network. Finally, the liver tumor is segmented accurately.
segmenting the liver tu mor labels of CT images using the
proposed DCMC-UNet model, wh ich analyses various
experimental outcomes utilizing the LiTS dataset.
Figure 5shows the tumor segmentation results of a liver CT
image fro m LiTS dataset. Here, the segmentation results of
the proposed DCMC-UNet model shows the tumor part of
the liver accurately.

IV. EXPERIM ENTA L RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

The proposed DCM C-UNet model is simu lated on
MATLAB platform. The details regarding evaluation
database, metrics and visualization results are discussed in
the following sub-sections.

A. Evaluati on Database

For our work, we used a CT image dataset, namely the Liver

Tumor Seg mentation Challenge (LiTS-ISBI2017). The
LiTS-ISB I2017 database [4] is a publically availab le (a) (b)
dataset consisting of 200 contrast-enhanced abdomen CT

978-1-6654-7884-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE 1627

Authorized licensed use limited to: VIT University- Chennai Campus. Downloaded on September 25,2023 at 15:20:27 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Computing and Data Communication Systems (ICSCDS-2022)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP22AZ5-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-7884-7

Figure 5. Liver tu mor segmentation results using LiTS REFERENCES

dataset. First colu mn (a) denotes input CT images and
second column (b) represents segmentation results of [1] D. L. Araújo, L. B. da Cruz, J. O. B. Diniz, J. L. Ferreira, A. C.
Silva, A. C. de Paiva, and M. Gattass, “Liver segmentation from
Proposed DCMC-UNet. (green color represents computed tomography images using cascade deep learning,”
thesegmented liver tumor) Computers in Biology and Medicine, vol. 140, p. 105095, Jan.
2022.
Table 1 and Table 2 show the performance results regarding [2] R. A. Khan, Y. Luo, and F.-X. Wu, “RMS-UNet: Residual
multi-scale UNet, for liver and lesion segmentation,” Artificial
the measurements of DG, DC, MSSD, ASSF, RVD, and
Intelligence in Medicine, vol. 124, p. 102231, Feb. 2022.
VOE with respect to the LiTS dataset. From this analysis, it [3] D. T. Kushnure and S. N. Talbar, “HFRU-Net: High-Level
is clear that the existing methods achieve the lowest Feature Fusion and Recalibration UNet for Automatic Liver and
performance, while the proposed model attains the best T umor Segmentation in CT Images,” Computer Methods and
Programs in Biomedicine, vol. 213, p. 106501, Jan. 2022.
segmentation result for CT images. [4] D. S. Uplaonkar,Virupakshappa, and N. Patil, “Modified Otsu
thresholding based level set and local direct ional ternary pattern
Table: 1 Performance comparison results in terms of DG technique for liver tumor segmentation,” International Journal
and DC metrics on LiTS dataset of System Assurance Engineering and Management, Jan. 2022.
[5] R. S. Patil, N. Biradar, and R. Pawar, “A new automated
Methods Liver-Tumor segmentation and classification of mammogram images,”
Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 81, no. 6, pp. 7783–
DC DG 7816, Jan. 2022.
[6] A. Kalsoom, M. Maqsood, S. Yasmin, M. Bukhari, Z. Shin, and
U-Net [15] 0.620 0.779 S. Rho, “A computer-aided diagnostic system for liver tumor
detection using modified U-Net architecture,” The Journal of
HDA-ResUNet [16] 0.653 0.799 Supercomputing, Jan. 2022.
2D U-Net and 3D 0.963 0.967 [7] J. Zhao, M. Dang, Z. Chen, and L. Wan, “DSU-Net: Distraction
FCN [10] Sensitive U-Netbfor 3D lung tumor segmentation,” Engineering
Proposed DCMC- 0.967 0.979 Applications of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 109, p. 104649, Mar.
2022.
UNet [8] L. Dercle, B. Zhao, M. Gönen, C. S. Moskowitz, D. E. Connors,
H. Yang, L. Lu, D. Reidy-Lagunes, T. Fojo, S. Karovic, M. L.
Table: 2 The comparison results in terms of MSSD, ASSF, Maitland,G. R. Oxnard, and L. H. Schwartz, “An imaging
RVD, and VOE metrics on LiTS dataset. (All metric values signature to predict outcome in metastatic colorectal cancer
using routine computed tomography scans,” European Journal
are represented in mean ± standard with respect to of Cancer, vol. 161, pp. 138–147, Jan. 2022.
percentage) [9] J. Li, G. Liao, W. Sun, J. Sun, T. Sheng, K. Zhu, K. M. von
Deneen, and Y. Zhang, “A 2.5D semantic segmentation of the
Liver-Tumor pancreas using attention guided dual context embedded U-Net,”
Methods Neurocomputing, vol. 480, pp. 14–26, Apr. 2022.
[10] Y. Zhang, B. Jiang, J. Wu, D. Ji,Y. Liu, Y. Chen, E. X. Wu, and
MSSD ASSD RVD VOE X. Tang, “Deep LearningInitializedandGradient Enhanced
U-Net [15] - - -30.31 49.12 ± Level-Set Based Segmentation for Liver T umor From CT
±8.33 19.49 Images,” IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 76056–76068, 2020.
[11] Y. Xu, M. Cai, L. Lin, Y. Zhang,H. Hu, Z. Peng, Q. Zhang, Q.
Un-Net [13] - - -15.82 37.34 ± Chen, X. Mao, Y. Iwamoto, X. Han, Y. Chen, and R. Tong,
±6.30 9.12 “PA‐ResSeg: A phase attention residual networkfor liver tumor
Proposed 4.44 ± 0.76 ± -0.44 ± 21.86 ± segmentation frommultiphase CT images,” Medical Physics,
DCMC-UNet 1.93 0.18 0.13 12.88 vol. 48, no. 7, pp. 3752–3766, May 2021.
[12] H. Jiang,,T. Shi, Z. Bai, and L. Huang, “AHCNet: An
Application of AttentionMechanism andHybridConnection
forLiverTumorSegmentation in CT Volumes,” IEEE Access,
Note: - denotes that the measurement was not evaluated. vol. 7, pp. 24898–24909, 2019.
[13] S.-T. Tran,C.-H. Cheng,and D.-G. Liu, “A Multiple Layer U-
IV. CONCLUSION Net,Un-Netfor Liver and Liver T umor Segmentation in CT ,”
Many researchers are interested in the segmentation of liver IEEE Access,vol. 9, pp. 3752–3764, 2021.
[14] X. Tang,X. Wang, J. Hou,H. Wu, and D. Liu, “An
tumor because of their usefulness in medical image analysis.
ImprovedSobelFaceGrayImageEdge DetectionAlgorithm,” 2020
This study presents a Dual channel mu ltiscale convolution 39th Chinese Control Conference (CCC), Jul. 2020.
U-net (DCM C-Unet) for the liver tu mor segmentation. In [15] N. Siddique, S.Paheding, C. P. Elkin, and V. Devabhaktuni, “U-
the beginning, the images are fed to the preprocessing stage. Net and Its Variants for Medical ImageSegmentation: A
The preprocessing stage contains two steps: IBTM, and Z Reviewof Theoryand Applications,” IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp.
82031–82057, 2021.
score normalizat ion. It is used to remove soft organs and [16] Z. Wang, Y. Zou, and P. X. Liu, “Hybrid dilationand attention
noise fro m the images. Then, in the next stage, the ESM is residual U-Net for medical image segmentation,” Computers in
used to enhance the local features by detecting the edges of Biology and Medicine, vol. 134, p. 104449, Jul. 2021.
the liver. Finally, the DCM C-Unet is utilized to segment the
liver tu mor by fusing mu lti scale features. The proposed
DCMC-Unetprovidesaccurate segmentation resultsof tumor
region in liver CT image. In the future, we will expand our
network to various segmentations of medical images.

978-1-6654-7884-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE 1628

Authorized licensed use limited to: VIT University- Chennai Campus. Downloaded on September 25,2023 at 15:20:27 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.