Enhanced ultrasound imaging multitask network for renal tumors diagnosis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based ultrasound image processing is quite important for diagnosis of renal tumors. Traditional networks, however, struggle with accurate lesion segmentation and differentiation between benign and malignant cases in complex ultrasound images. This paper introduces an advanced multitask network model to overcome these limitations. Our model combines a deep separable Convolutional ResNet with a NestedUNet, enriched with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and residual connections, enhancing its precision in lesion segmentation and classification in intricate images. Compared with the existing methods, the model proposed in this study has the following innovative contributions: (1) combining depthwise separable convolution and NestedUNet, the computational efficiency and feature extraction ability of the model are significantly improved; (2) The Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is introduced to enhance the attention to key features, to effectively distinguish lesions in complex backgrounds; (3) The gradient flow is improved by the residual connection, which ensures the stable training of the deep network. Experimental results show that the IoU of the model on the kidney tumor dataset reaches 94.23%, which is significantly better than that of STUNet (92.31%). These results show that the model proposed in this study has significant advantages in processing complex ultrasound images, providing a more accurate basis for clinical diagnosis, and has a high application potential.