Automatic lesion segmentation and classification of hepatic echinococcosis using a multiscale-feature convolutional neural network

Hepatic echinococcosis (HE) is a life-threatening liver disease caused by parasites that requires a precise diagnosis and proper treatments. To assess HE lesions accurately, we propose a novel automatic HE lesion segmentation and classification network that contains lesion region positioning (LRP) and lesion region segmenting (LRS) modules. First, we used the LRP module to obtain the probability map of the lesion distribution and the position of the lesion. Then, based on the result of the LRP module, we used the LRS module to precisely segment the HE lesions within the high-probability region. Finally, we classified the HE lesions and identified the lesion types by a convolutional neural network (CNN). The entire dataset was delineated by the hospital’s senior radiologist. We collected CT slices of 160 patients from Qinghai Provincial People’s Hospital. The Dice score of the final segmentation result reached 89.89%. The Dice scores, indicating the classification accuracy, for cystic vs. alveolar echinococcosis and calcified vs. noncalcified lesions were 80.32% and 82.45%, the sensitivities were 72.41% and 75.17%, the specificities were 83.72% and 86.04%, the NPVs were 80.01% and 86.96%, the PPVs were 80.45% and 81.74%, and the areas under the ROC curves were 0.8128 and 0.8205, respectively. Graphical abstract