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A new neural network for automatic head and neck cancer (HNC) segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presented. The proposed neural network is based on U-net, which combines features from different resolutions to achieve end-to-end locating and segmentation of medical images. In this work, the dilated convolution is introduced into U-net, to obtain larger receptive field so that extract multi-scale features. Also, this network uses Dice loss to reduce the imbalance between classes. The proposed algorithm is trained and tested on real MRI data. The cross-validation results show that the new network outperformed the original U-net by 5% (Dice score) on head and neck tumour segmentation.

A novel algorithm for automatic head and neck 3D tumour segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presented. The proposed algorithm pre-processes the MRI data slices to enhance quality and reduce artefacts. An intensity standardisation process is performed between slices, followed by cancer region segmentation of central slice, to get the correct intensity range and rough location of tumour regions. Fourier interpolation is applied to create isotropic 3D MRI volume. A new location-constrained 3D level set method segments the tumour from the interpolated MRI volume. The proposed algorithm is tested on real MRI data. The results show that the novel 3D tumour volume extraction algorithm has an improved dice score and F -measure when compared to the previous 2D and 3D segmentation method.

A novel algorithm for automatic 3D segmentation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data for detection of head and neck cancerous lymph nodes (LN)) is presented in this paper. The proposed algorithm pre-processes the MRI data slices to enhance quality and reduce artefacts. A modified Fuzzy c-mean process is performed through all slices, followed by a probability map which refines the clustering results, to detect the approximate position of cancerous lymph nodes. Fourier interpolation is applied to create an isotropic 3D MRI volume. A new 3D level set method segments the tumour from the interpolated MRI volume. The proposed algorithm is tested on synthetic and real MRI data. The results show that the novel cancerous lymph nodes 3D volume extraction algorithm has over 0.9 Dice similarity score on synthetic data and 0.7 on real MRI data. The F-measure is 0.92 on synthetic data and 0.75 on real data.