RASNet: Renal automatic segmentation using an improved U-Net with multi-scale perception and attention unit

For the treatment of renal disease, the application of radioactive equipment has become one of the important methods. Accurate segmentation of renal contour plays an important role in clinical diagnosis. However, manual renal contour drawing is not only inefficient but also prone to inaccurate outlining results due to different manual proficiency and fatigue caused by long-term work. There is little research on automatic renal segmentation with renal dynamic imaging. To address this issue, an improved model based on a deep neural network called Renal Automatic Segmentation Network (RASNet) is proposed, to aid in the automatic segmentation of renal contours. Besides, a multi-scale spatial perception module and a decoding module with attention connection are introduced to enrich the semantic information and further improve the accuracy of network segmentation. Extensive experiments were conducted on a renal dynamic medical image database established in this paper. Analysis results show the superiority of the proposed RASNet to several existing segmentation frameworks.