Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Phys.
Sec. Medical Physics and Imaging
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fphy.2024.1478750

Advanced Gastrointestinal Tract Organ Differentiation Using an Integrated Swin Transformer U-Net Model for Cancer Care

Provisionally accepted
Neha Sharma Neha Sharma 1Sheifali Gupta Sheifali Gupta 1Ahmad Almogren Ahmad Almogren 2Ayman Altameem Ayman Altameem 2Salil Bharany Salil Bharany 1Ateeq Ur Rehman Ateeq Ur Rehman 3*
  • 1 Chitkara University, Chandigarh, Punjab, India
  • 2 King Saud University, Riyadh, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
  • 3 Gachon University, Seongnam, Republic of Korea

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The segmentation of gastrointestinal (GI) organs, including the stomach, small intestine, and large intestine, is crucial for radio oncologists to plan effective cancer therapy. This study presents an innovative semantic segmentation approach that integrates the Swin Transfor mer Block with the U-Net model to delineate healthy GI organs accurately using MRI data. The paper presents a novel approach that merges the Swin Transformer and U-Net models to leverage global context learning capabilities and fine-grained spatial resolution. Incorporating this integration greatly enhances the model's capacity to achieve precise and comprehens ive semantic segmentation, specifically in accurately outlining the gastrointestinal tract in MRI data. It utilizes the Swin Transformer, incorporating a shift-based windowing technique to gather contextual information efficiently while ensuring scalability. This novel architecture effectively balances local and global contexts, improving performance across various computer vision tasks, especially in medical imaging for segmenting the gastrointestinal tract. The model was trained and tested on the UW Madison GI Tract dataset, which comprises 38,496 MRI images from actual cancer cases. By leveraging the self-attention mechanisms of the Swin Transformer to capture global context and long-term dependencies, this approach combines the strengths of both models. The proposed architecture achieved a loss of 0.0949, a dice coefficient of 0.9190, and an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.8454, demonstrating its effectiveness in providing high accuracy and robust performance. This technology holds significant potential for integration into clinical processes, enhancing the precision of radiation therapy for GI cancer patients.

    Keywords: swin transformer, U-net model, segmentation, Gastrointestinal Tract, radiation therapy, UW Madison GI Tract Dataset

    Received: 10 Aug 2024; Accepted: 02 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Sharma, Gupta, Almogren, Altameem, Bharany and Rehman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ateeq Ur Rehman, Gachon University, Seongnam, Republic of Korea

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.