Feet Segmentation for Regional Analgesia Monitoring Using Convolutional RFF and Layer-Wise Weighted CAM Interpretability

Regional neuraxial analgesia for pain relief during labor is a universally accepted, safe, and effective procedure involving administering medication into the epidural. Still, an adequate assessment requires continuous patient monitoring after catheter placement. This research introduces a cutting-edge semantic thermal image segmentation method emphasizing superior interpretability for regional neuraxial analgesia monitoring. Namely, we propose a novel Convolutional Random Fourier Features-based approach, termed CRFFg, and custom-designed layer-wise weighted class-activation maps created explicitly for foot segmentation. Our method aims to enhance three well-known semantic segmentation (FCN, UNet, and ResUNet). We have rigorously evaluated our methodology on a challenging dataset of foot thermal images from pregnant women who underwent epidural anesthesia. Its limited size and significant variability distinguish this dataset. Furthermore, our validation results indicate that our proposed methodology not only delivers competitive results in foot segmentation but also significantly improves the explainability of the process.