Background
Pneumoconiosis has a significant impact on the quality of patient survival. This study aims to evaluate the performance and application value of improved Unet network technology in the recognition and segmentation of lesion areas in lung CT pneumoconiosis images.
Methods
A total of 1212 lung CT images of patients with pneumoconiosis were retrospectively included. The improved Unet network was used to identify and segment the CT image regions of the patients' lungs, and the image data of the granular regions of the lungs were processed by the watershed and region growing algorithms. After random sorting, 848 data were selected into the training set and 364 data into the testing set. The experimental dataset was augmented by data, and then model training and testing were carried out to examine the segmentation performance and compare the segmentation results with traditional Unet networks.
Results
In the segmentation of lung CT granular region, the improved Unet network innovated the network structure in a lightweight way, optimized the residual block, and used GeLu function to replace ReLu function. The three evaluation indexes of Dice similarity coefficient, positive prediction value (PPV), and sensitivity coefficient(SC) reached 0.848, 0.884, and 0.895, respectively. Compared with the traditional Unet network, the improved Unet network was improved by 7.6%, 13.3% and 3.9%, respectively, while the segmentation performance was also better than the traditional Unet network.
Conclusions
The improved Unet network proposed in this study shows good performance in the recognition and segmentation of abnormal regions in lung CT images of pneumoconiosis patients, and is an appropriate method for the recognition and segmentation of abnormal regions in lung CT images, showing potential application value for assisting clinical decision-making.