1.Biventricular segmentation using U-Net incorporating improved Transformer and convolutional channel attention module
Muxuan CHEN ; Jinli YUAN ; Zhitao GUO ; Chenggang LU
Chinese Journal of Medical Physics 2024;41(1):32-42
A U-Net incorporating improved Transformer and convolutional channel attention module is designed for biventricular segmentation in MRI image.By replacing the high-level convolution of U-Net with the improved Transformer,the global feature information can be effectively extracted to cope with the challenge of poor segmentation performance due to the complex morphological variation of the right ventricle.The improved Transformer incorporates a fixed window attention for position localization in the self-attention module,and aggregates the output feature map for reducing the feature map size;and the network learning capability is improved by increasing network depth through the adjustment of multilayer perceptron.To solve the problem of unsatisfactory segmentation performance caused by blurred tissue edges,a feature aggregation module is used for the fusion of multi-level underlying features,and a convolutional channel attention module is adopted to rescale the underlying features to achieve adaptive learning of feature weights.In addition,a plug-and-play feature enhancement module is integrated to improve the segmentation performance which is affected by feature loss due to channel decay in the codec structure,which guarantees the spatial information while increasing the proportion of useful channel information.The test on the ACDC dataset shows that the proposed method has higher biventricular segmentation accuracy,especially for the right ventricle segmentation.Compared with other methods,the proposed method improves the DSC coefficient by at least 2.83%,proving its effectiveness in biventricular segmentation.