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Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is a malignant tumor that occurs in the epithelium and mucosal glands of the nasopharynx, and its pathological type is mostly poorly differentiated squamous cell carcinoma. Since the nasopharynx is located deep in the head and neck, early diagnosis and timely treatment are critical to patient survival. However, nasopharyngeal carcinoma tumors are small in size and vary widely in shape, and it is also a challenge for experienced doctors to delineate tumor contours. In addition, due to the special location of nasopharyngeal carcinoma, complex treatments such as radiotherapy or surgical resection are often required, so accurate pathological diagnosis is also very important for the selection of treatment options. However, the current deep learning segmentation model faces the problems of inaccurate segmentation and unstable segmentation process, which are mainly limited by the accuracy of data sets, fuzzy boundaries, and complex lines. In order to solve these two challenges, this article proposes a hybrid model WET-UNet based on the UNet network as a powerful alternative for nasopharyngeal cancer image segmentation. On the one hand, wavelet transform is integrated into UNet to enhance the lesion boundary information by using low-frequency components to adjust the encoder at low frequencies and optimize the subsequent computational process of the Transformer to improve the accuracy and robustness of image segmentation. On the other hand, the attention mechanism retains the most valuable pixels in the image for us, captures the remote dependencies, and enables the network to learn more representative features to improve the recognition ability of the model. Comparative experiments show that our network structure outperforms other models for nasopharyngeal cancer image segmentation, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of adding two modules to help tumor segmentation. The total data set of this article is 5000, and the ratio of training and verification is 8:2. In the experiment, accuracy = 85.2% and precision = 84.9% can show that our proposed model has good performance in nasopharyngeal cancer image segmentation., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a malignant tumor that occurs in the wall of the nasopharyngeal cavity and is prevalent in Southern China, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. According to studies, NPC is one of the most common malignant tumors in Hainan, China, and it has the highest incidence rate among otorhinolaryngological malignancies. We proposed a new deep learning network model to improve the segmentation accuracy of the target region of nasopharyngeal cancer. Our model is based on the U-Net-based network, to which we add Dilated Convolution Module, Transformer Module, and Residual Module. The new deep learning network model can effectively solve the problem of restricted convolutional fields of perception and achieve global and local multi-scale feature fusion. In our experiments, the proposed network was trained and validated using 10-fold cross-validation based on the records of 300 clinical patients. The results of our network were evaluated using the dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and the average symmetric surface distance (ASSD). The DSC and ASSD values are 0.852 and 0.544 mm, respectively. With the effective combination of the Dilated Convolution Module, Transformer Module, and Residual Module, we significantly improved the segmentation performance of the target region of the NPC., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Zeng, Zeng, Shen, Liang, Li, Zhao, Zhang and Shen.)