Perspective+ Unet: Enhancing Segmentation with Bi-Path Fusion and Efficient Non-Local Attention for Superior Receptive Fields

Abstract

Precise segmentation of medical images is fundamental for extracting critical clinical information, which plays a pivotal role in enhancing the accuracy of diagnoses, formulating effective treatment plans, and improving patient outcomes. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and non-local attention methods have achieved notable success in medical image segmentation, they either struggle to capture long-range spatial dependencies due to their reliance on local features, or face significant computational and feature integration challenges when attempting to address this issue with global attention mechanisms. To overcome existing limitations in medical image segmentation, we propose a novel architecture, Perspective+ Unet. This framework is characterized by three major innovations: (i) It introduces a dual-pathway strategy at the encoder stage that combines the outcomes of traditional and dilated convolutions. This not only maintains the local receptive field but also significantly expands it, enabling better comprehension of the global structure of images while retaining detail sensitivity. (ii) The framework incorporates an efficient non-local transformer block, named ENLTB, which utilizes kernel function approximation for effective long-range dependency capture with linear computational and spatial complexity. (iii) A Spatial Cross-Scale Integrator strategy is employed to merge global dependencies and local contextual cues across model stages, meticulously refining features from various levels to harmonize global and local information. Experimental results on the ACDC and Synapse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Perspective+ Unet. The code is available in the supplementary material.