SA-Net: A scale-attention network for medical image segmentation.

MH-Net: Model-data-driven hybrid-fusion network for medical image segmentation

Explainable multi-module semantic guided attention based network for medical image segmentation

LCP-Net: A local context-perception deep neural network for medical image segmentation

Segmenting medical images via explicit–implicit attention aggregation

MC-DC: An MLP-CNN Based Dual-path Complementary Network for Medical Image Segmentation

CASF-Net: Cross-attention and cross-scale fusion network for medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation is crucial for improving healthcare outcomes. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely applied in medical image analysis; however, their inherent inductive biases limit their ability to capture global contextual information. Vision transformer (ViT) architectures address this limitation by leveraging attention mechanisms to model global relationships; however, they typically require large-scale datasets for effective training, which is challenging in the field of medical imaging due to limited data availability. This study aimed to integrate the advantages of CNN and ViT architectures to improve segmentation performance on small-scale medical image datasets. In this study, we established a U-shaped network architecture based on a Transformer-assisted convolutional neural network (TAC-UNet). The TAC-UNet is primarily composed of a hybrid structure integrating CNN and Transformer components. Specifically, the hybrid architecture follows a dual-path design in which the Transformer branch continuously conveys global contextual information to the CNN backbone. This allows the CNN backbone to enhance its global perception while building on the local features it extracts, thereby improving its ability to comprehend complex image structures. A channel cross-attention (CCA) module is also incorporated as a bridge between the encoder and decoder to better reconcile the semantic discrepancies between them. Detailed experiments on three public datasets were conducted. Specifically, our model was trained on 30 images from the Multi-organ Nucleus Segmentation (MoNuSeg) training dataset, 85 images from the Gland Segmentation (GlaS) training dataset, and 551 images from the Computer Vision Center Colorectal Cancer-Clinic Database (CVC-ClinicDB) dataset. We evaluated the performance of our model on the corresponding test sets. Our TAC-UNet achieved the best Dice scores (80.36%, 90.70%, and 91.81% on the MoNuSeg, GlaS, and CVC-ClinicDB datasets, respectively) of all the models. Compared to other CNN-based, Transformer-based, and hybrid methods, the TAC-UNet demonstrated significantly superior segmentation performance. Our TAC-UNet model showed advanced segmentation performance on small-scale medical image datasets. The detailed experimental results showed the effectiveness of the method. Our model's code is available at: https://github.com/hejlhello/TAC-UNet.

MultiTrans: Multi-branch transformer network for medical image segmentation

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained tremendous popularity for various imaging related tasks such as artificial image generation to support AI training. GANs are especially useful for medical imaging-related tasks where training datasets are usually limited in size and heavily imbalanced against the diseased class. We present a systematic review, following the PRISMA guidelines, of recent GAN architectures used for medical image analysis to help the readers in making an informed decision before employing GANs in developing medical image classification and segmentation models. We have extracted 54 papers that highlight the capabilities and application of GANs in medical imaging from January 2015 to August 2020 and inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. Our results show four main architectures of GAN that are used for segmentation or classification in medical imaging. We provide a comprehensive overview of recent trends in the application of GANs in clinical diagnosis through medical image segmentation and classification and ultimately share experiences for task-based GAN implementations.

As a computer-aided diagnosis technique, medical image segmentation can help doctors improve the accuracy and efficiency of disease diagnosis. In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made great progress in the field of medical image segmentation, and medical image segmentation networks using encoder-decoder and jump connection structures have a wide range of applications in the medical field.

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation via feature similarity and reliable-region enhancement

In medical image segmentation, U-Net and its variants are widely utilized. However, CNN-based models are limited in long-range dependency modeling, while Transformer-based models are constrained by quadratic computational complexity. Recently, state space models (SSMs) such as Mamba have emerged as a promising solution, as they excel at modeling long-range interactions while maintaining linear computational complexity. This paper proposes the CIHM, a hybrid Mamba model that provides contextual insights. Its key component is the context-insight Mamba-CNN layer (CiMC layer). The CiMC layer adopts a hybrid Mamba-CNN approach to process features across different scales and levels in parallel, thereby enhancing the semantic segmentation of medical images. Specifically, the SSM branch of this layer captures long-range dependencies with comprehensive contextual semantic understanding, while the CNN block achieves superior local feature extraction using T-shaped convolution that focuses on patch centers. Moreover, to further aggregate multi-scale contextual information of medical images, we design the multiscale refining detail bridge (MRDB) module. This module significantly improves feature representation through the dense multiplication and concatenation of features for fusion. Comprehensive experiments on the ISIC2017, ISIC2018, Synapse, and DSB18 datasets demonstrate that CIHM exhibits strong competitive performance and efficiency in medical image segmentation tasks. Notably, CIHM achieves better segmentation performance than the well-known U-Net and the modern hybrid network U-Mamba, while reducing the parameter count by 40 times and 345 times, respectively. This demonstrates the potential of our approach to advance model lightweighting.

ABSTRACTSemantic segmentation is a key task in computer vision, with medical image segmentation as a prominent downstream application that has seen significant advancements in recent years. However, the challenge of requiring extensive annotations in medical image segmentation remains exceedingly difficult. In addressing this issue, semi‐supervised semantic segmentation has emerged as a new approach to mitigate annotation burdens. Nonetheless, existing methods in semi‐supervised medical image segmentation still face challenges in fully exploiting unlabeled data and efficiently integrating labeled and unlabeled data. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel network model—feature similarity multilevel information fusion network (FSMIFNet). First, the feature similarity module is introduced to harness deep feature similarity among unlabeled images, predicting true label constraints and guiding segmentation features with deep feature relationships. This approach fully exploits deep feature information from unlabeled data. Second, the multilevel information fusion framework integrates labeled and unlabeled data to enhance segmentation quality in unlabeled images, ensuring consistency between original and feature maps for comprehensive optimization of detail and global information. In the ACDC dataset, our method achieves an mDice of 0.684 with 5% labeled data, 0.873 with 10%, 0.884 with 20%, and 0.897 with 50%. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FSMIFNet in semi‐supervised semantic segmentation of medical images, outperforming existing methods on public benchmark datasets. The code and models are available at https://github.com/liujiayin12/FSMIFNet.git.

Machine learning techniques such as deep learning methods have produced promising results in medical images analysis. This work proposes a user-friendly system that utilizes deep learning techniques for detecting and diagnosing diseases using medical images. This includes the design of CAD-based project that can reduce human factor-related errors while performing manual screening of medical images. The system accepts medical images as input and performs segmentation of the images. Segmentation process analyzes and identifies the region of interest (ROI) of diseases from medical images. Analyzing and segmentation of medical images has assisted in the diagnosis and monitoring of some diseases. Diseases such as skin cancer, age-related fovea degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, and choroidal neovascularization can be effectively managed by the analysis of skin lesion and retinal vessels images. The proposed system was evaluated on diseases such as diabetic retinopathy from retina images and skin cancer from dermoscopic images.

Segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image analysis. Current state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks on medical image segmentation capture local context information using fixed-shape receptive fields and feature detectors with position-invariant weights, which limits the robustness to the variance of input, such as medical objects of variant sizes, shapes, and domains. In order to capture global context information, we propose High-order Attention (HA), a novel attention module with adaptive receptive fields and dynamic weights. HA allows each pixel to has its own global attention map that models its relationship to all other pixels. In particular, HA constructs the attention map through graph transduction and thus captures high relevant context information at high-order. Consequently, feature maps at each position are selectively aggregated as a weighted sum of feature maps at all positions. We further embed the proposed HA module into an efficient encoder-decoder structure for medical image segmentation, namely High-order Attention Network (HANet). Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark sets for three tasks, i.e., REFUGE and Drishti-GS1 for optic disc/cup segmentation, DRIVE for blood vessel segmentation, and LUNA for lung segmentation. The results justify the effectiveness of the new attention module for medical image segmentation.