Hassan Bagher-Ebadian

Chengyin Li, Yao Qiang, Rafi Ibn Sultan et al.

Computed Tomography (CT) based precise prostate segmentation for treatment planning is challenging due to (1) the unclear boundary of the prostate derived from CT's poor soft tissue contrast and (2) the limitation of convolutional neural network-based models in capturing long-range global context. Here we propose a novel focal transformer-based image segmentation architecture to effectively and efficiently extract local visual features and global context from CT images. Additionally, we design an auxiliary boundary-induced label regression task coupled with the main prostate segmentation task to address the unclear boundary issue in CT images. We demonstrate that this design significantly improves the quality of the CT-based prostate segmentation task over other competing methods, resulting in substantially improved performance, i.e., higher Dice Similarity Coefficient, lower Hausdorff Distance, and Average Symmetric Surface Distance, on both private and public CT image datasets. Our code is available at this \href{https://github.com/ChengyinLee/FocalUNETR.git}{link}.

Niloufar Eghbali, Hassan Bagher-Ebadian, Tuka Alhanai et al.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown promise in medical image semantic segmentation (MISS) by capturing long-range correlations. However, ViTs often struggle to model local spatial information effectively, which is essential for accurately segmenting fine anatomical details, particularly when applied to small datasets without extensive pre-training. We introduce Gabor and Laplacian of Gaussian Convolutional Swin Network (GLoG-CSUnet), a novel architecture enhancing Transformer-based models by incorporating learnable radiomic features. This approach integrates dynamically adaptive Gabor and Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filters to capture texture, edge, and boundary information, enhancing the feature representation processed by the Transformer model. Our method uniquely combines the long-range dependency modeling of Transformers with the texture analysis capabilities of Gabor and LoG features. Evaluated on the Synapse multi-organ and ACDC cardiac segmentation datasets, GLoG-CSUnet demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art models, achieving a 1.14% increase in Dice score for Synapse and 0.99% for ACDC, with minimal computational overhead (only 15 and 30 additional parameters, respectively). GLoG-CSUnet's flexible design allows integration with various base models, offering a promising approach for incorporating radiomics-inspired feature extraction in Transformer architectures for medical image analysis. The code implementation is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/HAAIL/GLoG-CSUnet.