Segmentation of head and neck tumours using modified U-net

A new neural network for automatic head and neck cancer (HNC) segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presented. The proposed neural network is based on U-net, which combines features from different resolutions to achieve end-to-end locating and segmentation of medical images. In this work, the dilated convolution is introduced into U-net, to obtain larger receptive field so that extract multi-scale features. Also, this network uses Dice loss to reduce the imbalance between classes. The proposed algorithm is trained and tested on real MRI data. The cross-validation results show that the new network outperformed the original Unet by 5% (Dice score) on head and neck tumour segmentation.