Multi-scale information with attention integration for classification of liver fibrosis in B-mode US image

Background and objective: Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is one of the most common liver diseases in the world, which threats a lot to people's usual life. The increased deposition of fibrotic tissues in livers for patients with CHB may lead to the development of liver cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, or even liver failure. Accurate fibrosis staging is very important for the targeted treatment of liver fibrosis and its recovery. Methods: In this paper, we propose a new deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with functions of multi-scale information extraction and attention integration for more accurate liver fibrosis classification from ultrasound (US) images. The proposed network uses two pyramid-structured CNN elements to extract multi-scale features from US images. Such a design significantly enlarges the receptive field of the convolution layer, such that more useful information can be explored by the neural network to associate with the final classification. Based on this, a new feature distillation method is also proposed to enhance the ability of deep features derived from multi-scale information. The proposed distillation method employs attention maps to automatically extract class-related features from multi-scale information, which effectively suppress the influence of potential distractors. Results: Experimental results on the US liver fibrosis dataset collected from 286 participants show that the proposed deep framework achieves promising classification performance. The proposed method achieves a classification accuracy of 95.66% on the test dataset. Conclusion: Our proposed framework could stage liver fibrosis highly accurately. It might provide effective suggestions for the clinical treatment of liver fibrosis that can facilitate its recovery. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.