IEA-Net: Internal and External Dual-Attention Medical Segmentation Network with High-Performance Convolutional Blocks.

Currently, deep learning is developing rapidly in the field of image segmentation, and medical image segmentation is one of the key applications in this field. Conventional CNN has achieved great success in general medical image segmentation tasks, but it has feature loss in the feature extraction part and lacks the ability to explicitly model remote dependencies, which makes it difficult to adapt to the task of human organ segmentation. Although methods containing attention mechanisms have made good progress in the field of semantic segmentation, most of the current attention mechanisms are limited to a single sample, while the number of samples of human organ images is large, ignoring the correlation between the samples is not conducive to image segmentation. In order to solve these problems, an internal and external dual-attention segmentation network (IEA-Net) is proposed in this paper, and the ICSwR (interleaved convolutional system with residual) module and the IEAM module are designed in this network. The ICSwR contains interleaved convolution and hopping connection, which are used for the initial extraction of the features in the encoder part. The IEAM module (internal and external dual-attention module) consists of the LGGW-SA (local-global Gaussian-weighted self-attention) module and the EA module, which are in a tandem structure. The LGGW-SA module focuses on learning local-global feature correlations within individual samples for efficient feature extraction. Meanwhile, the EA module is designed to capture inter-sample connections, addressing multi-sample complexities. Additionally, skip connections will be incorporated into each IEAM module within both the encoder and decoder to reduce feature loss. We tested our method on the Synapse multi-organ segmentation dataset and the ACDC cardiac segmentation dataset, and the experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

EAAC-Net: An Efficient Adaptive Attention and Convolution Fusion Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation.

Accurate segmentation of skin lesions in dermoscopic images is of key importance for quantitative analysis of melanoma. Although existing medical image segmentation methods significantly improve skin lesion segmentation, they still have limitations in extracting local features with global information, do not handle challenging lesions well, and usually have a large number of parameters and high computational complexity. To address these issues, this paper proposes an efficient adaptive attention and convolutional fusion network for skin lesion segmentation (EAAC-Net). We designed two parallel encoders, where the efficient adaptive attention feature extraction module (EAAM) adaptively establishes global spatial dependence and global channel dependence by constructing the adjacency matrix of the directed graph and can adaptively filter out the least relevant tokens at the coarse-grained region level, thus reducing the computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism. The efficient multiscale attention-based convolution module (EMA⋅C) utilizes multiscale attention for cross-space learning of local features extracted from the convolutional layer to enhance the representation of richly detailed local features. In addition, we designed a reverse attention feature fusion module (RAFM) to enhance the effective boundary information gradually. To validate the performance of our proposed network, we compared it with other methods on ISIC 2016, ISIC 2018, and PH2 public datasets, and the experimental results show that EAAC-Net has superior segmentation performance under commonly used evaluation metrics.