  Segmentation of the sigmoid colon is a crucial aspect of treating
diverticulitis. It enables accurate identification and localisation of
inflammation, which in turn helps healthcare professionals make informed
decisions about the most appropriate treatment options. This research presents
a novel deep learning architecture for segmenting the sigmoid colon from
Computed Tomography (CT) images using a modified 3D U-Net architecture. Several
variations of the 3D U-Net model with modified hyper-parameters were examined
in this study. Pyramid pooling (PyP) and channel-spatial Squeeze and Excitation
(csSE) were also used to improve the model performance. The networks were
trained using manually annotated sigmoid colon. A five-fold cross-validation
procedure was used on a test dataset to evaluate the network's performance. As
indicated by the maximum Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 56.92+/-1.42%,
the application of PyP and csSE techniques improves segmentation precision. We
explored ensemble methods including averaging, weighted averaging, majority
voting, and max ensemble. The results show that average and majority voting
approaches with a threshold value of 0.5 and consistent weight distribution
among the top three models produced comparable and optimal results with DSC of
88.11+/-3.52%. The results indicate that the application of a modified 3D U-Net
architecture is effective for segmenting the sigmoid colon in Computed
Tomography (CT) images. In addition, the study highlights the potential
benefits of integrating ensemble methods to improve segmentation precision.

Image and Video Processing;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Machine Learning