ProSegNet: A New Network of Prostate Segmentation Based on MR Images

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men after lung cancer. Generally, the segmentation of the prostate is the preprocessing work for the diagnosis of prostate cancer. Aiming at the variety of prostate and the similarity of visual characteristics between prostates and their surroundings, this paper proposes a new prostate segmentation network based on MR images, denoted as ProSegNet. ProSegNet consists of two parts: encoder and decoder. To improve the feature extraction capability of the encoder, we use dense blocks as the feature extraction unit, and at the same time introduce a cross-stage partial (CSP) structure to reduce the amount of calculation. In the design of the decoder structure, we integrated the spatial attention mechanism and the channel attention mechanism to enable it to focus on the important features while ignoring the invalid features. In addition, to segment the prostate more accurately, we add a prostate contour segmentation branch to the output of the segmentation network to learn the contour features of the prostate. Finally, to alleviate the problem of small intensity difference between the prostate and surrounding tissues, we designed a truncated intensity stretching image enhancement method. The performance of ProSegNet has been experimentally verified in the Promise12 and ProstateX datasets. On the Promise12 dataset, the dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and hausdorff (Haus) distance are 0.908 and 9.87 respectively. On the ProstateX dataset, the DSC and Haus reach the results of 0.892 and 10.45, respectively. Experimental results show that the ProSegNet can obtain a competitive performance.