Optimized Activation for Quantum-Inspired Self-supervised Neural Network based Fully Automated Brain MR Image Segmentation

The slow-convergence problem degrades the segmentation performance of the recently proposed Quantum-Inspired Self-supervised Neural Network models owing to lack of suitable tailoring of the inter-connection weights. Hence, incorporation of quantum-inspired meta-heuristics in the Quantum-Inspired Self-supervised Neural Network models optimizes their hyper-parameters and inter-connection weights. This paper is aimed at proposing an optimized version of a Quantum-Inspired Self-supervised Neural Network (QIS-Net) model for optimal

segmentation of brain Magnetic Resonance (MR) Imaging. The suggested Optimized Quantum-Inspired Self-supervised Neural Network (Opti-QISNet) model resembles the architecture of QIS-Net and its operations are leveraged to obtain optimal segmentation outcome. The optimized activation function employed in the presented model is referred to as Quantum-Inspired Optimized Multi-Level Sigmoidal (Opti-QSig) activation. The Opti-QSig activation function is optimized by three quantum-inspired meta-heuristics with fifitness evaluation using Otsu’s multi-level thresholding. Rigorous experiments have been conducted on Dynamic Susceptibility Contrast (DSC) brain MR images from Nature data repository. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed self-supervised Opti-QISNet model offffers a promising alternative to the deeply supervised neural network based architectures (UNet and FCNNs) in medical image segmentation and outperforms our recently developed models QIBDS Net and QIS-Net.