An Enhanced Measurement of Epicardial Fat Segmentation and Severity Classification using Modified U-Net and FOA-guided XGBoost

The amount of epicardial fat around the heart has a significant impact on cardiovascular function and requires precise measurement for timely treatment. In this work, an improved U-Net architecture is proposed for accurate segmentation of epicardial fat in computer tomography (CT) images. The proposed method integrates a modified squeeze-and-excitation (MSE) block and a multi-scale dense (MS-D) convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve feature extraction. In addition, a metaheuristic optimization algorithm from falcon optimization algorithm (FOA) is used for efficient feature selection. The selected features are then classified using the XGBoost algorithm to determine the fat severity. Experimental evaluations on a CT image dataset show the superior segmentation performance of the proposed U-Net compared to existing architectures. It achieves a mean intersection over union (Mean IOU) of 89.5 %, a mean Dice score (MDS) of 94.3 %, and a Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.973. FOA-guided feature selection further increases the accuracy of severity classification. The overall classification accuracy of the model is 98 %. These results highlight the technological advancements and measurement accuracy of the proposed U-Net architecture. They also demonstrate the suitability of the model to improve cardiovascular risk assessment and management.