Intelligent system based on multiple networks for accurate ovarian tumor semantic segmentation

Ovarian tumors, especially malignant ones, represent a global concern, with increased prevalence in recent years. More accurate medical support systems are urgently needed to support medical staff in obtaining an efficient ovarian tumors diagnosis since detection in early stages could lead to immediately applying appropriate treatment, and implicitly improving the survival rate. The current paper aims to demonstrate that more accurate systems could be designed by combining different convolutional neural networks using different custom combination approaches and by selecting the appropriate networks to be involved in the ensemble model to achieve the best performance metrics. It is essential to understand if combining all experimented networks or only the best-performing ones could always lead to the most effective results or not. The current paper is structured in three main phases. The first step is to propose the individual networks involved in the experiments. Five DeepLab-V3+ networks with different encoders (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, MobileNet-V2, InceptionResNet-V2, and Xception) were used. In the second step, the paper proposes a custom algorithm to combine multiple individual semantic segmentation networks, while the last step describes the iterative selection approach for selecting all individual networks to be combined so that the most accurate ensemble is obtained. The system performing semantic segmentation for different types of ovarian tumors, covering both benign and malignant ones, achieved 91.18 % Intersection over union (IoU), thus overperforming all individual networks. The proposed method could be extended so that more powerful deep learning models could be used.