# Decoupled Pyramid Correlation Network for Liver Tumor Segmentation from CT images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13199/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04056/) (2019)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [Large Kernel Matters -- Improve Semantic Segmentation by Global Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02719/) (2017)
- [Attention to Scale: Scale-aware Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03339/) (2015)
- [Understanding Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08502/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10180/) (2018)
- [The One Hundred Layers Tiramisu: Fully Convolutional DenseNets for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09326/) (2016)
- [Concurrent Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation in Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02579/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06091/) (2021)
- [Learning a Discriminative Feature Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09337/) (2018)
- [Learn To Pay Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02391/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Large-Vocabulary Segmentation for Medical Images with Text Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17183/) (2023)
- [HANS-Net: Hyperbolic Convolution and Adaptive Temporal Attention for Accurate and Generalizable Liver and Tumor Segmentation in CT Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11325/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Purpose: Automated liver tumor segmentation from Computed Tomography (CT) images is a necessary prerequisite in the interventions of hepatic abnormalities and surgery planning. However, accurate liver tumor segmentation remains challenging due to the large variability of tumor sizes and inhomogeneous texture. Recent advances based on Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) for medical image segmentation drew on the success of learning discriminative pyramid features. In this paper, we propose a Decoupled Pyramid Correlation Network (DPC-Net) that exploits attention mechanisms to fully leverage both low- and high-level features embedded in FCN to segment liver tumor. Methods: We first design a powerful Pyramid Feature Encoder (PFE) to extract multi-level features from input images. Then we decouple the characteristics of features concerning spatial dimension (i.e., height, width, depth) and semantic dimension (i.e., channel). On top of that, we present two types of attention modules, Spatial Correlation (SpaCor) and Semantic Correlation (SemCor) modules, to recursively measure the correlation of multi-level features. The former selectively emphasizes global semantic information in low-level features with the guidance of high-level ones. The latter adaptively enhance spatial details in high-level features with the guidance of low-level ones. Results: We evaluate the DPC-Net on MICCAI 2017 LiTS Liver Tumor Segmentation (LiTS) challenge dataset. Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Average Symmetric Surface Distance (ASSD) are employed for evaluation. The proposed method obtains a DSC of 76.4% and an ASSD of 0.838 mm for liver tumor segmentation, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. It also achieves a competitive results with a DSC of 96.0% and an ASSD of 1.636 mm for liver segmentation.