DOI: https://doi.org/10.15368/theses.2021.30
Available at: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/2298
Date of Award
3-2021
Degree Name
MS in Electrical Engineering
Department/Program
Electrical Engineering
College
College of Engineering
Advisor
Jane Zhang
Advisor Department
Electrical Engineering
Advisor College
College of Engineering
Abstract
Healthcare systems are constantly challenged with bottlenecks due to human-reliant operations, such as analyzing medical images. High precision and repeatability is necessary when performing a diagnostics on patients with tumors. Throughout the years an increasing number of advancements have been made using various machine learning algorithms for the detection of tumors helping to fast track diagnosis and treatment decisions. “Black Box” systems such as the complex deep learning networks discussed in this paper rely heavily on hyperparameter optimization in order to obtain the most ideal performance. This requires a significant time investment in the tuning of such networks to acquire cutting-edge results. The approach of this paper relies on implementing a state of the art deep learning framework, the nn-UNet, in order to label computed tomography (CT) images from patients with kidney cancer through semantic segmentation by feeding raw CT images through a deep architecture and obtaining pixel-wise mask classifications. Taking advantage of nn-UNet’s framework versatility, various configurations of the architecture are explored and applied, benchmarking and assorting resulting performance, including variations of 2D and 3D convolutions as well as the use of distinct cost functions such as the Sørensen-Dice coefficient, Cross Entropy, and a compound of them. 79% is the accuracy currently reported for the detection of benign and malign tumors using CT imagery performed by medical practitioners. The best iteration and mixture of parameters in this work resulted in an accuracy of 83% for tumor labelling. This study has further exposed the performance of a versatile and groundbreaking approach to deep learning framework designed for biomedical image segmentation.