# Precise Liver Tumor Segmentation in CT Using a Hybrid Deep Learning-Radiomics Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07574 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07574/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (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)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Learning to Refine Object Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08695/) (2016)
- [Vox2Vox: 3D-GAN for Brain Tumour Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13653/) (2020)
- [Liver lesion segmentation informed by joint liver segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07734/) (2017)
- [From Hand-Crafted to Deep Learning-based Cancer Radiomics: Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07954/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic Radiomics: Ambiguous Diagnosis with Controllable Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08878/) (2019)
- [Metastatic liver tumour segmentation from discriminant Grassmannian manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00083/) (2015)
- [Radiomic Synthesis Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11090/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate three-dimensional delineation of liver tumors on contrast-enhanced CT is a prerequisite for treatment planning, navigation and response assessment, yet manual contouring is slow, observer-dependent and difficult to standardise across centres. Automatic segmentation is complicated by low lesion-parenchyma contrast, blurred or incomplete boundaries, heterogeneous enhancement patterns, and confounding structures such as vessels and adjacent organs. We propose a hybrid framework that couples an attention-enhanced cascaded U-Net with handcrafted radiomics and voxel-wise 3D CNN refinement for joint liver and liver-tumor segmentation. First, a 2.5D two-stage network with a densely connected encoder, sub-pixel convolution decoders and multi-scale attention gates produces initial liver and tumor probability maps from short stacks of axial slices. Inter-slice temporal consistency is then enforced by a simple three-slice refinement rule along the cranio-caudal direction, which restores thin and tiny lesions while suppressing isolated noise. Next, 728 radiomic descriptors spanning intensity, texture, shape, boundary and wavelet feature groups are extracted from candidate lesions and reduced to 20 stable, highly informative features via multi-strategy feature selection; a random forest classifier uses these features to reject false-positive regions. Finally, a compact 3D patch-based CNN derived from AlexNet operates in a narrow band around the tumor boundary to perform voxel-level relabelling and contour smoothing.