DCFNet:An Effective Dual-Branch Cross-Attention Fusion Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of medical images provides a reliable scientific basis for disease diagnosis and analysis.Notably,most existing methods that combine the strengths of convolutional neural networks(CNNs)and Transformers have made significant progress.However,there are some limitations in the current integration of CNN and Transformer technology in two key aspects.Firstly,most methods either overlook or fail to fully incorporate the complementary nature between local and global features.Secondly,the significance of integrating the multiscale encoder features from the dual-branch network to enhance the decoding features is often disregarded in methods that combine CNN and Transformer.To address this issue,we present a groundbreaking dual-branch cross-attention fusion network(DCFNet),which efficiently combines the power of Swin Transformer and CNN to generate complementary global and local features.We then designed the Feature Cross-Fusion(FCF)module to efficiently fuse local and global features.In the FCF,the utilization of the Channel-wise Cross-fusion Transformer(CCT)serves the purpose of aggregatingmulti-scale features,and the Feature FusionModule(FFM)is employed to effectively aggregate dual-branch prominent feature regions from the spatial perspective.Furthermore,within the decoding phase of the dual-branch network,our proposed Channel Attention Block(CAB)aims to emphasize the significance of the channel features between the up-sampled features and the features generated by the FCFmodule to enhance the details of the decoding.Experimental results demonstrate that DCFNet exhibits enhanced accuracy in segmentation performance.Compared to other state-of-the-art(SOTA)methods,our segmentation framework exhibits a superior level of competitiveness.DCFNet’s accurate segmentation of medical images can greatly assist medical professionals in making crucial diagnoses of lesion areas in advance.

A review of medical ocular image segmentation

Deep learning has been extensively applied to medical image segmentation,resulting in significant advancements in the field of deep neural networks for medical image segmentation since the notable success of U Net in 2015.However,the application of deep learning models to ocular medical image segmentation poses unique challenges,especially compared to other body parts,due to the complexity,small size,and blurriness of such images,coupled with the scarcity of data.This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of medical image segmentation from two perspectives:the development of deep network structures and the application of segmentation in ocular imaging.Initially,the article introduces an overview of medical imaging,data processing,and performance evaluation metrics.Subsequently,it analyzes recent developments in U-Net-based network structures.Finally,for the segmentation of ocular medical images,the application of deep learning is reviewed and categorized by the type of ocular tissue.

ATFF: Advanced Transformer with Multiscale Contextual Fusion for Medical Image Segmentation

Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) greatly promotes the automatic segmentation of medical images. However, due to the inherent properties of convolution operations, CNN usually cannot establish long-distance interdependence, which limits the segmentation performance. Transformer has been successfully applied to various computer vision, using self-attention mechanism to simulate long-distance interaction, so as to capture global information. However, self-attention lacks spatial location and high-performance computing. In order to solve the above problems, we develop a new medical transformer, which has a multi-scale context fusion function and can be used for medical image segmentation. The proposed model combines convolution operation and attention mechanism to form a u-shaped framework, which can capture both local and global information. First, the traditional converter module is improved to an advanced converter module, which uses post-layer normalization to obtain mild activation values, and uses scaled cosine attention with a moving window to obtain accurate spatial information. Secondly, we also introduce a deep supervision strategy to guide the model to fuse multi-scale feature information. It further enables the proposed model to effectively propagate feature information across layers, Thanks to this, it can achieve better segmentation performance while being more robust and efficient. The proposed model is evaluated on multiple medical image segmentation datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance on a challenging dataset (ETIS) compared to existing methods that rely only on convolutional neural networks, transformers, or a combination of both. The mDice and mIou indicators increased by 2.74% and 3.3% respectively.

Deep Learning for Image Segmentation: A Focus on Medical Imaging

Image segmentation is crucial for various research areas. Manycomputer vision applications depend on segmenting images to understandthe scene, such as autonomous driving, surveillance systems, robotics, andmedical imaging. With the recent advances in deep learning (DL) and itsconfounding results in image segmentation, more attention has been drawnto its use in medical image segmentation. This article introduces a surveyof the state-of-the-art deep convolution neural network (CNN) models andmechanisms utilized in image segmentation. First, segmentation models arecategorized based on their model architecture and primary working principle.Then, CNN categories are described, and various models are discussed withineach category. Compared with other existing surveys, several applicationswith multiple architectural adaptations are discussed within each category.A comparative summary is included to give the reader insights into utilizedarchitectures in different applications and datasets. This study focuses onmedical image segmentation applications, where the most widely used architecturesare illustrated, and other promising models are suggested that haveproven their success in different domains. Finally, the present work discussescurrent limitations and solutions along with future trends in the field.

Application of U-Net and Optimized Clustering in Medical Image Segmentation:A Review

As a mainstream research direction in the field of image segmentation,medical image segmentation plays a key role in the quantification of lesions,three-dimensional reconstruction,region of interest extraction and so on.Compared with natural images,medical images have a variety of modes.Besides,the emphasis of information which is conveyed by images of different modes is quite different.Because it is time-consuming and inefficient to manually segment medical images only by professional and experienced doctors.Therefore,large quantities of automated medical image segmentation methods have been developed.However,until now,researchers have not developed a universal method for all types of medical image segmentation.This paper reviews the literature on segmentation techniques that have produced major breakthroughs in recent years.Among the large quantities of medical image segmentation methods,this paper mainly discusses two categories of medical image segmentation methods.One is the improved strategies based on traditional clustering method.The other is the research progress of the improved image segmentation network structure model based on U-Net.The power of technology proves that the performance of the deep learning-based method is significantly better than that of the traditional method.This paper discussed both advantages and disadvantages of different algorithms and detailed how these methods can be used for the segmentation of lesions or other organs and tissues,as well as possible technical trends for future work.

Dual-Branch-UNet: A Dual-Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation

In intelligent perception and diagnosis of medical equipment,the visual and morphological changes in retinal vessels are closely related to the severity of cardiovascular diseases(e.g.,diabetes and hypertension).Intelligent auxiliary diagnosis of these diseases depends on the accuracy of the retinal vascular segmentation results.To address this challenge,we design a Dual-Branch-UNet framework,which comprises a Dual-Branch encoder structure for feature extraction based on the traditional U-Net model for medical image segmentation.To be more explicit,we utilize a novel parallel encoder made up of various convolutional modules to enhance the encoder portion of the original U-Net.Then,image features are combined at each layer to produce richer semantic data and the model’s capacity is adjusted to various input images.Meanwhile,in the lower sampling section,we give up pooling and conduct the lower sampling by convolution operation to control step size for information fusion.We also employ an attentionmodule in the decoder stage to filter the image noises so as to lessen the response of irrelevant features.Experiments are verified and compared on the DRIVE and ARIA datasets for retinal vessels segmentation.The proposed Dual-Branch-UNet has proved to be superior to other five typical state-of-the-art methods.

LGNet:Local and global representation learning for fast biomedical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis and therapy systems,yet still faces many challenges.Building on convolutional neural networks(CNNs),medical image segmentation has achieved tremendous progress.However,owing to the locality of convolution operations,CNNs have the inherent limitation in learning global context.To address the limitation in building global context relationship from CNNs,we propose LGNet,a semantic segmentation network aiming to learn local and global features for fast and accurate medical image segmentation in this paper.Specifically,we employ a two-branch architecture consisting of convolution layers in one branch to learn local features and transformer layers in the other branch to learn global features.LGNet has two key insights:(1)We bridge two-branch to learn local and global features in an interactive way;(2)we present a novel multi-feature fusion model(MSFFM)to leverage the global contexture information from transformer and the local representational features from convolutions.Our method achieves state-of-the-art trade-off in terms of accuracy and efficiency on several medical image segmentation benchmarks including Synapse,ACDC and MOST.Specifically,LGNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance with Dice's indexes of 80.15%on Synapse,of 91.70%on ACDC,and of 95.56%on MOST.Meanwhile,the inference speed attains at 172 frames per second with 224-224 input resolution.The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LGNet for fast and accurate for medical image segmentation.

TC-Fuse: A Transformers Fusing CNNs Network for Medical Image Segmentation

In medical image segmentation task,convolutional neural networks(CNNs)are difficult to capture long-range dependencies,but transformers can model the long-range dependencies effectively.However,transformers have a flexible structure and seldom assume the structural bias of input data,so it is difficult for transformers to learn positional encoding of the medical images when using fewer images for training.To solve these problems,a dual branch structure is proposed.In one branch,Mix-Feed-Forward Network(Mix-FFN)and axial attention are adopted to capture long-range dependencies and keep the translation invariance of the model.Mix-FFN whose depth-wise convolutions can provide position information is better than ordinary positional encoding.In the other branch,traditional convolutional neural networks(CNNs)are used to extract different features of fewer medical images.In addition,the attention fusion module BiFusion is used to effectively integrate the information from the CNN branch and Transformer branch,and the fused features can effectively capture the global and local context of the current spatial resolution.On the public standard datasets Gland Segmentation(GlaS),Colorectal adenocarcinoma gland(CRAG)and COVID-19 CT Images Segmentation,the F1-score,Intersection over Union(IoU)and parameters of the proposed TC-Fuse are superior to those by Axial Attention U-Net,U-Net,Medical Transformer and other methods.And F1-score increased respectively by 2.99%,3.42%and 3.95%compared with Medical Transformer.

Generative Deep Belief Model for Improved Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image assessment is based on segmentation at its fundamental stage.Deep neural networks have been more popular for segmentation work in recent years.However,the quality of labels has an impact on the training performance of these algorithms,particularly in the medical image domain,where both the interpretation cost and inter-observer variation are considerable.For this reason,a novel optimized deep learning approach is proposed for medical image segmentation.Optimization plays an important role in terms of resources used,accuracy,and the time taken.The noise in the raw medical image are processed using Quasi-Continuous Wavelet Transform(QCWT).Then,feature extraction and selection are done after the pre-processing of the image.The features are optimally selected by the Golden Eagle Optimization(GEO)method.Specifically,the processed image is segmented accurately using the proposed Generative Heap Belief Network(GHBN)technique.The execution of this research is done on MATLAB software.According to the results of the experiments,the proposed framework is superior to current techniques in terms of segmentation performance with a valid accuracy of 99%,which is comparable to the other methods.

Survey of methods and principles in three-dimensional reconstruction from two-dimensional medical images

Three-dimensional(3D)reconstruction of human organs has gained attention in recent years due to advances in the Internet and graphics processing units.In the coming years,most patient care will shift toward this new paradigm.However,development of fast and accurate 3D models from medical images or a set of medical scans remains a daunting task due to the number of pre-processing steps involved,most of which are dependent on human expertise.In this review,a survey of pre-processing steps was conducted,and reconstruction techniques for several organs in medical diagnosis were studied.Various methods and principles related to 3D reconstruction were highlighted.The usefulness of 3D reconstruction of organs in medical diagnosis was also highlighted.

Short‐term and long‐term memory self‐attention network for segmentation of tumours in 3D medical images

Tumour segmentation in medical images(especially 3D tumour segmentation)is highly challenging due to the possible similarity between tumours and adjacent tissues,occurrence of multiple tumours and variable tumour shapes and sizes.The popular deep learning‐based segmentation algorithms generally rely on the convolutional neural network(CNN)and Transformer.The former cannot extract the global image features effectively while the latter lacks the inductive bias and involves the complicated computation for 3D volume data.The existing hybrid CNN‐Transformer network can only provide the limited performance improvement or even poorer segmentation performance than the pure CNN.To address these issues,a short‐term and long‐term memory self‐attention network is proposed.Firstly,a distinctive self‐attention block uses the Transformer to explore the correlation among the region features at different levels extracted by the CNN.Then,the memory structure filters and combines the above information to exclude the similar regions and detect the multiple tumours.Finally,the multi‐layer reconstruction blocks will predict the tumour boundaries.Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods in terms of subjective visual and quantitative evaluation.Compared with the most competitive method,the proposed method provides Dice(82.4%vs.76.6%)and Hausdorff distance 95%(HD95)(10.66 vs.11.54 mm)on the KiTS19 as well as Dice(80.2%vs.78.4%)and HD95(9.632 vs.12.17 mm)on the LiTS.

A network lightweighting method for difficult segmentation of 3D medical images

Currently,deep learning is widely used in medical image segmentation and has achieved good results.However,3D medical image segmentation tasks with diverse lesion characters,blurred edges,and unstable positions require complex networks with a large number of parameters.It is computationally expensive and results in high requirements on equipment,making it hard to deploy the network in hospitals.In this work,we propose a method for network lightweighting and applied it to a 3D CNN based network.We experimented on a COVID-19 lesion segmentation dataset.Specifically,we use three cascaded one-dimensional convolutions to replace a 3D convolution,and integrate instance normalization with the previous layer of one-dimensional convolutions to accelerate network inference.In addition,we simplify test-time augmentation and deep supervision of the network.Experiments show that the lightweight network can reduce the prediction time of each sample and the memory usage by 50%and reduce the number of parameters by 60%compared with the original network.The training time of one epoch is also reduced by 50%with the segmentation accuracy dropped within the acceptable range.

UDT:U-shaped deformable transformer for subarachnoid haemorrhage image segmentation

Subarachnoid haemorrhage(SAH),mostly caused by the rupture of intracranial aneu-rysm,is a common disease with a high fatality rate.SAH lesions are generally diffusely distributed,showing a variety of scales with irregular edges.The complex characteristics of lesions make SAH segmentation a challenging task.To cope with these difficulties,a u-shaped deformable transformer(UDT)is proposed for SAH segmentation.Specifically,first,a multi-scale deformable attention(MSDA)module is exploited to model the diffuseness and scale-variant characteristics of SAH lesions,where the MSDA module can fuse features in different scales and adjust the attention field of each element dynamically to generate discriminative multi-scale features.Second,the cross deformable attention-based skip connection(CDASC)module is designed to model the irregular edge char-acteristic of SAH lesions,where the CDASC module can utilise the spatial details from encoder features to refine the spatial information of decoder features.Third,the MSDA and CDASC modules are embedded into the backbone Res-UNet to construct the proposed UDT.Extensive experiments are conducted on the self-built SAH-CT dataset and two public medical datasets(GlaS and MoNuSeg).Experimental results show that the presented UDT achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

AF-Net:A Medical Image Segmentation Network Based on Attention Mechanism and Feature Fusion

Medical image segmentation is an important application field of computer vision in medical image processing.Due to the close location and high similarity of different organs in medical images,the current segmentation algorithms have problems with mis-segmentation and poor edge segmentation.To address these challenges,we propose a medical image segmentation network(AF-Net)based on attention mechanism and feature fusion,which can effectively capture global information while focusing the network on the object area.In this approach,we add dual attention blocks(DA-block)to the backbone network,which comprises parallel channels and spatial attention branches,to adaptively calibrate and weigh features.Secondly,the multi-scale feature fusion block(MFF-block)is proposed to obtain feature maps of different receptive domains and get multi-scale information with less computational consumption.Finally,to restore the locations and shapes of organs,we adopt the global feature fusion blocks(GFF-block)to fuse high-level and low-level information,which can obtain accurate pixel positioning.We evaluate our method on multiple datasets(the aorta and lungs dataset),and the experimental results achieve 94.0%in mIoU and 96.3%in DICE,showing that our approach performs better than U-Net and other state-of-art methods.

Mu-Net:Multi-Path Upsampling Convolution Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation plays an important role in clinical diagnosis,quantitative analysis,and treatment process.Since 2015,U-Net-based approaches have been widely used formedical image segmentation.The purpose of the U-Net expansive path is to map low-resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps.However,the consecutive deconvolution and convolutional operations in the expansive path lead to the loss of some high-level information.More high-level information can make the segmentationmore accurate.In this paper,we propose MU-Net,a novel,multi-path upsampling convolution network to retain more high-level information.The MU-Net mainly consists of three parts:contracting path,skip connection,and multi-expansive paths.The proposed MU-Net architecture is evaluated based on three different medical imaging datasets.Our experiments show that MU-Net improves the segmentation performance of U-Net-based methods on different datasets.At the same time,the computational efficiency is significantly improved by reducing the number of parameters by more than half.

MAAUNet:Exploration of U-shaped encoding and decoding structure for semantic segmentation of medical image

In view of the problems of multi-scale changes of segmentation targets,noise interference,rough segmentation results and slow training process faced by medical image semantic segmentation,a multi-scale residual aggregation U-shaped attention network structure of MAAUNet(MultiRes aggregation attention UNet)is proposed based on MultiResUNet.Firstly,aggregate connection is introduced from the original feature aggregation at the same level.Skip connection is redesigned to aggregate features of different semantic scales at the decoder subnet,and the problem of semantic gaps is further solved that may exist between skip connections.Secondly,after the multi-scale convolution module,a convolution block attention module is added to focus and integrate features in the two attention directions of channel and space to adaptively optimize the intermediate feature map.Finally,the original convolution block is improved.The convolution channels are expanded with a series convolution structure to complement each other and extract richer spatial features.Residual connections are retained and the convolution block is turned into a multi-channel convolution block.The model is made to extract multi-scale spatial features.The experimental results show that MAAUNet has strong competitiveness in challenging datasets,and shows good segmentation performance and stability in dealing with multi-scale input and noise interference.

Improved Medical Image Segmentation Model Based on 3D U-Net

With the widespread application of deep learning in the field of computer vision,gradually allowing medical image technology to assist doctors in making diagnoses has great practical and research significance.Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional U-Net model in 3D spatial information extraction,model over-fitting,and low degree of semantic information fusion,an improved medical image segmentation model has been used to achieve more accurate segmentation of medical images.In this model,we make full use of the residual network(ResNet)to solve the over-fitting problem.In order to process and aggregate data at different scales,the inception network is used instead of the traditional convolutional layer,and the dilated convolution is used to increase the receptive field.The conditional random field(CRF)can complete the contour refinement work.Compared with the traditional 3D U-Net network,the segmentation accuracy of the improved liver and tumor images increases by 2.89%and 7.66%,respectively.As a part of the image processing process,the method in this paper not only can be used for medical image segmentation,but also can lay the foundation for subsequent image 3D reconstruction work.

Research and Realization of Medical Image Fusion Based on Three-Dimensional Reconstruction

A new medical image fusion technique is presented.The method is based on three-dimensional reconstruction.After reconstruction,the three-dimensional volume data is normalized by three-dimensional coordinate conversion in the same way and intercepted through setting up cutting plane including anatomical structure,as a result two images in entire registration on space and geometry are obtained and the images are fused at last.Compared with traditional two-dimensional fusion technique,three-dimensional fusion technique can not only resolve the different problems existed in the two kinds of images,but also avoid the registration error of the two kinds of images when they have different scan and imaging parameter.The research proves this fusion technique is more exact and has no registration,so it is more adapt to arbitrary medical image fusion with different equipments.

MEDICAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION BASED ON A MODIFIED LEVEL SET ALGORITHM

Objective To present a novel modified level set algorithm for medical image segmentation. Methods The algorithm is developed by substituting the speed function of level set algorithm with the region and gradient information of the image instead of the conventional gradient information. This new algorithm has been tested by a series of different modality medical images. Results We present various examples and also evaluate and compare the performance of our method with the classical level set method on weak boundaries and noisy images. Conclusion Experimental results show the proposed algorithm is effective and robust.

SVM for density estimation and application to medical image segmentation

A method of medical image segmentation based on support vector machine (SVM) for density estimation is presented. We used this estimator to construct a prior model of the image intensity and curvature profile of the structure from training images. When segmenting a novel image similar to the training images, the technique of narrow level set method is used. The higher dimensional surface evolution metric is defined by the prior model instead of by energy minimization function. This method offers several advantages. First, SVM for density estimation is consistent and its solution is sparse. Second, compared to the traditional level set methods, this method incorporates shape information on the object to be segmented into the segmentation process. Segmentation results are demonstrated on synthetic images, MR images and ultrasonic images.