ResTransUnet: An effective network combined with Transformer and U-Net for liver segmentation in CT scans

Liver segmentation is a fundamental prerequisite for the diagnosis and surgical planning of hepatocellular carcinoma. Traditionally, the liver contour is drawn manually by radiologists using a slice-by-slice method. However, this process is time-consuming and error-prone, depending on the radiologist’s experience. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end automatic liver segmentation framework, named ResTransUNet, which exploits the transformer’s ability to capture global context for remote interactions and spatial relationships, as well as the excellent performance of the original U-Net architecture. The main contribution of this paper lies in proposing a novel fusion network that combines Unet and Transformer architectures. In the encoding structure, a dual-path approach is utilized, where features are extracted separately using both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer networks. Additionally, an effective feature enhancement unit is designed to transfer the global features extracted by the Transformer network to the CNN for feature enhancement. This model aims to address the drawbacks of traditional Unet-based methods, such as feature loss during encoding and poor capture of global features. Moreover, it avoids the disadvantages of pure Transformer models, which suffer from large parameter sizes and high computational complexity. The experimental results on the LiTS2017 dataset demonstrate remarkable performance for our proposed model, with Dice coefficients, volumetric overlap error (VOE), and relative volume difference (RVD) values for liver segmentation reaching 0.9535, 0.0804, and −0.0007, respectively. Furthermore, to further validate the model’s generalization capability, we conducted tests on the 3Dircadb, Chaos, and Sliver07 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other closely related models with higher liver segmentation accuracy. In addition, significant improvements can be achieved by applying our method when handling liver segmentation with small and discontinuous liver regions, as well as blurred liver boundaries. The code is available at the website: https://github.com/Jouiry/ResTransUNet. •ResTransUnet merges U-Net’s rapid learning with Transformer’s broad generalization.•An attention mechanism is proposed to fuse local features with global features.•Higher accuracy compared to the U-Net and Transformer-based methods.•Extensive experiments on datasets demonstrate ResTransUnet’s