DuAT: Dual-Aggregation Transformer Network for Medical Image Segmentation

21 Dec 2022  ·  Feilong Tang, Qiming Huang, Jinfeng Wang, Xianxu Hou, Jionglong Su, Jingxin Liu ·

Transformer-based models have been widely demonstrated to be successful in computer vision tasks by modelling long-range dependencies and capturing global representations. However, they are often dominated by features of large patterns leading to the loss of local details (e.g., boundaries and small objects), which are critical in medical image segmentation. To alleviate this problem, we propose a Dual-Aggregation Transformer Network called DuAT, which is characterized by two innovative designs, namely, the Global-to-Local Spatial Aggregation (GLSA) and Selective Boundary Aggregation (SBA) modules. The GLSA has the ability to aggregate and represent both global and local spatial features, which are beneficial for locating large and small objects, respectively. The SBA module is used to aggregate the boundary characteristic from low-level features and semantic information from high-level features for better preserving boundary details and locating the re-calibration objects. Extensive experiments in six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the segmentation of skin lesion images, and polyps in colonoscopy images. In addition, our approach is more robust than existing methods in various challenging situations such as small object segmentation and ambiguous object boundaries.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Medical Image Segmentation 2018 Data Science Bowl DuAT Dice 0.926 # 1
mIoU 0.870 # 2
Medical Image Segmentation CVC-ClinicDB DuAT mean Dice 0.948 # 5
mIoU 0.906 # 15
Average MAE 0.006 # 1
Medical Image Segmentation CVC-ColonDB DuAT mean Dice 0.819 # 7
mIoU 0.737 # 7
Average MAE 0.026 # 8
Medical Image Segmentation ETIS-LARIBPOLYPDB DuAT mIoU 0.746 # 5
Average MAE 0.013 # 2
mean Dice 0.822 # 4
Lesion Segmentation ISIC 2018 DuAT Dice Score 0.923 # 2
Mean IoU 0.867 # 1
Medical Image Segmentation Kvasir-SEG DuAT Average MAE 0.023 # 2
mean Dice 0.924 # 15
mIoU 0.876 # 15

Methods