Automatic segmentation of female urine control anatomical elements and related structures in MRI images based on deep learning

To construct an automatic segmentation model to segment female urine control anatomy on MRI images based on deep learning methods in order to improve the segmentation efficiency and accuracy.

A dataset comprising 49 female pelvic floor muscle MRI images [30 women with varying degrees of pelvic organ prolapse (POP) and 19 healthy individuals], obtained from Faculty of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Imaging in Army Medical University, was used for model training and testing. The dataset was split into a training set (17 normal cases and 22 POP cases) and a testing set (4 normal cases and 6 POP cases) in a ratio of 8∶2. The training set was used to train UNet, UNet+++, Dense UNet, and UNet++ models separately, and then input into each network. The model achieving the highest testing accuracy was selected as the backbone network.

Under the training of UNet, UNet+++, Dense UNet, and UNet++, the 4 models achieved average Dice similarity coefficients of 61.82%, 57.94%, 57.63%, and 62.76%, respectively, for the segmentation of 5 anatomical structures (compressor urethrae, urethra sphincter body, bladder wall, bladder cavity and urethra submucosa). The corresponding Intersection over Union (IoU) score was 49.74%, 46.59%, 46.07%, and 49.44%, while the accuracy rate was 61.74%, 55.03%, 59.23%, and 61.91%, respectively for the 4 models. Notably, UNet++ consistently outperformed UNet, UNet+++, and Dense UNet across the 3 metrics, indicating that UNet++ achieved the highest overall segmentation accuracy.

In UNet, UNet++, Dense UNet and UNet++ for automatic segmentation of 5 female urine control anatomical elements, UNet++ achieves the best overall segmentation accuracy.