Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation via Cross-Reference Transformer

Abstract

Deep learning models have become the mainstream method for medical image segmentation, but they require a large manually labeled dataset for training and are difficult to extend to unseen categories. Few-shot segmentation(FSS) has the potential to address these challenges by learning new categories from a small number of labeled samples. The majority of the current methods employ a prototype learning architecture, which involves expanding support prototype vectors and concatenating them with query features to conduct conditional segmentation. However, such framework potentially focuses more on query features while may neglect the correlation between support and query features. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised few shot medical image segmentation network with Cross-Reference Transformer, which addresses the lack of interaction between the support image and the query image. We first enhance the correlation features between the support set image and the query image using a bidirectional cross-attention module. Then, we employ a cross-reference mechanism to mine and enhance the similar parts of support features and query features in high-dimensional channels. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves good results on both CT dataset and MRI dataset.