AUTHOR=Jenifa Sharon J. , Jani Anbarasi L. 
  
TITLE=Advanced kidney mass segmentation using VHUCS-Net with protuberance detection network
  
JOURNAL=Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
  
VOLUME=Volume 9 - 2026
  
YEAR=2026
  
URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2026.1716063
  
DOI=10.3389/frai.2026.1716063
  
ISSN=2624-8212
  
ABSTRACT=IntroductionAccurate segmentation of kidney masses and structure is essential for medical application including diagnosis and treatment. This research proposed the dual track hybrid VHUCS-Net architecture which effectively highlights structural size-shape variants, boundaries and complex structural features in kidney disease.MethodsEfficient segmentation is achieved by integrating the transformer enhanced U-Net model with the contrast optimized Protuberance Detection Network (PDN) model. The process begins with analysing kidney images using a standard U-Net combined with Vision Transformer attention and a High Resolution Network (HRNet) which capture global dependencies while preserving high resolution features resulting in accurate segmentation of the kidney region. Also, the masked kidney image undergoes processing through a contrast optimized PDN model with multi scale pooling, contrast enhancement, boundary refinement and explicit feature fusion to segment the mass region thereby enhancing mass localization improving border identification and enabling accurate abnormality detection. The resulting features are fused to provide a refined mass segmentation result that exactly identifies the location and structural abnormalities.ResultsThe VHUCS-Net model was evaluated using the kidney segmentation dataset achieving an intersection over union score of 0.9441 and a dice coefficient of 0.9712 showing outstanding segmentation precision.DiscussionThese results indicate improved diagnostic efficiency and support clinical decision making by providing more accurate and interpretable segmentation outputs. Moreover, VHUCS-Net is validated with additional publicly available datasets with image mask correspondence, therefore proving the model effectiveness and generalizability across many segmentation tasks. The results highlight the capability of the proposed VHUCS-Net model to enhance diagnostic accuracy and assist clinical decision making through more detailed and interpretable segmentation outcomes.