Enhancing U-Net with Spatial-Channel Attention Gate for Abnormal Tissue Segmentation in Medical Imaging
Source abstract
Abstract
In recent years, deep learning has dominated medical image segmentation. Encoder-decoder architectures, such as U-Net, can be used in state-of-the-art models with powerful designs that are achieved by implementing skip connections that propagate local information from an encoder path to a decoder path to retrieve detailed spatial information lost by pooling operations. Despite their effectiveness for segmentation, these naïve skip connections still have some disadvantages. First, multi-scale skip connections tend to use unnecessary information and computational sources, where likable low-level encoder features are repeatedly used at multiple scales. Second, the contextual information of the low-level encoder feature is insufficient, leading to poor performance for pixel-wise recognition when concatenating with the corresponding high-level decoder feature. In this study, we propose a novel spatial-channel attention gate that addresses the limitations of plain skip connections. This can be easily integrated into an encoder-decoder network to effectively improve the performance of the image segmentation task. Comprehensive results reveal that our spatial-channel attention gate remarkably enhances the segmentation capability of the U-Net architecture with a minimal computational overhead added. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the conventional deep networks in term of Dice score, which achieves 71.72%.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline
Research context
OpenAlex topics: Advanced Neural Network Applications · Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging · COVID-19 diagnosis using AI
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Chonnam National University, 77 Yongbong-ro, Gwangju 61186, Korea
Funding
National Research Foundation of Korea
References (35)
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