An Encoder-Decoder Network for Automatic Clinical Target Volume Target Segmentation of Cervical Cancer in CT Images

Cervical cancer is a common gynecological cancer, and its common treatment method radiotherapy depends on target area delineation. The manual delineation work takes a long time and has low accuracy, so automating such delineation is important. At present, some traditional image segmentation algorithms for target area delineation have low accuracy rates. Deep learning algorithms also face some difficulties, such as insufficient data and long training time. As the popular network used in medical image segmentation, U-net still has several disadvantages when handling small targets with unclear boundaries. According to the characteristics of the clinical target volume target segmentation task of cervical cancer, this study modified the U-net structure and optimized the training loss to improve the accuracy of small target detection. The modified structure could handle target boundaries well with operations such as bilinear upsampling. Finally, the proposed algorithm was evaluated on the dataset and compared with several deep learning-based algorithms. Results indicate that the proposed approach has certain superiority. © The author(s) 2022.