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arXiv2021

Duo-SegNet: Adversarial Dual-Views for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Segmentation of images is a long-standing challenge in medical AI. This is mainly due to the fact that training a neural network to perform image segmentation requires a significant number of pixel-level annotated data, which is often unavailable. To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised image segmentation technique based on the concept of multi-view learning. In contrast to the previous art, we introduce an adversarial form of dual-view training and employ a critic to formulate the learning problem in multi-view training as a min-max problem. Thorough quantitative and qualitative evaluations on several datasets indicate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation algorithms consistently and comfortably. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/himashi92/Duo-SegNet

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

USE: Universal Segment Embeddings for Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation

The open-vocabulary image segmentation task involves partitioning images into semantically meaningful segments and classifying them with flexible text-defined categories. The recent vision-based foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown superior performance in generating class-agnostic image segments. The main challenge in open-vocabulary image segmentation now lies in accurately classifying these segments into text-defined categories. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Segment Embedding (USE) framework to address this challenge. This framework is comprised of two key components: 1) a data pipeline designed to efficiently curate a large amount of segment-text pairs at various granularities, and 2) a universal segment embedding model that enables precise segment classification into a vast range of text-defined categories. The USE model can not only help open-vocabulary image segmentation but also facilitate other downstream tasks (e.g., querying and ranking). Through comprehensive experimental studies on semantic segmentation and part segmentation benchmarks, we demonstrate that the USE framework outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary segmentation methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Locate then Segment: A Strong Pipeline for Referring Image Segmentation

Referring image segmentation aims to segment the objects referred by a natural language expression. Previous methods usually focus on designing an implicit and recurrent feature interaction mechanism to fuse the visual-linguistic features to directly generate the final segmentation mask without explicitly modeling the localization information of the referent instances. To tackle these problems, we view this task from another perspective by decoupling it into a "Locate-Then-Segment" (LTS) scheme. Given a language expression, people generally first perform attention to the corresponding target image regions, then generate a fine segmentation mask about the object based on its context. The LTS first extracts and fuses both visual and textual features to get a cross-modal representation, then applies a cross-model interaction on the visual-textual features to locate the referred object with position prior, and finally generates the segmentation result with a light-weight segmentation network. Our LTS is simple but surprisingly effective. On three popular benchmark datasets, the LTS outperforms all the previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (e.g., +3.2% on RefCOCO+ and +3.4% on RefCOCOg). In addition, our model is more interpretable with explicitly locating the object, which is also proved by visualization experiments. We believe this framework is promising to serve as a strong baseline for referring image segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Mamba-Sea: A Mamba-based Framework with Global-to-Local Sequence Augmentation for Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation

To segment medical images with distribution shifts, domain generalization (DG) has emerged as a promising setting to train models on source domains that can generalize to unseen target domains. Existing DG methods are mainly based on CNN or ViT architectures. Recently, advanced state space models, represented by Mamba, have shown promising results in various supervised medical image segmentation. The success of Mamba is primarily owing to its ability to capture long-range dependencies while keeping linear complexity with input sequence length, making it a promising alternative to CNNs and ViTs. Inspired by the success, in the paper, we explore the potential of the Mamba architecture to address distribution shifts in DG for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we propose a novel Mamba-based framework, Mamba-Sea, incorporating global-to-local sequence augmentation to improve the model's generalizability under domain shift issues. Our Mamba-Sea introduces a global augmentation mechanism designed to simulate potential variations in appearance across different sites, aiming to suppress the model's learning of domain-specific information. At the local level, we propose a sequence-wise augmentation along input sequences, which perturbs the style of tokens within random continuous sub-sequences by modeling and resampling style statistics associated with domain shifts. To our best knowledge, Mamba-Sea is the first work to explore the generalization of Mamba for medical image segmentation, providing an advanced and promising Mamba-based architecture with strong robustness to domain shifts. Remarkably, our proposed method is the first to surpass a Dice coefficient of 90% on the Prostate dataset, which exceeds previous SOTA of 88.61%. The code is available at https://github.com/orange-czh/Mamba-Sea.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

HC-Mamba: Vision MAMBA with Hybrid Convolutional Techniques for Medical Image Segmentation

Automatic medical image segmentation technology has the potential to expedite pathological diagnoses, thereby enhancing the efficiency of patient care. However, medical images often have complex textures and structures, and the models often face the problem of reduced image resolution and information loss due to downsampling. To address this issue, we propose HC-Mamba, a new medical image segmentation model based on the modern state space model Mamba. Specifically, we introduce the technique of dilated convolution in the HC-Mamba model to capture a more extensive range of contextual information without increasing the computational cost by extending the perceptual field of the convolution kernel. In addition, the HC-Mamba model employs depthwise separable convolutions, significantly reducing the number of parameters and the computational power of the model. By combining dilated convolution and depthwise separable convolutions, HC-Mamba is able to process large-scale medical image data at a much lower computational cost while maintaining a high level of performance. We conduct comprehensive experiments on segmentation tasks including organ segmentation and skin lesion, and conduct extensive experiments on Synapse, ISIC17 and ISIC18 to demonstrate the potential of the HC-Mamba model in medical image segmentation. The experimental results show that HC-Mamba exhibits competitive performance on all these datasets, thereby proving its effectiveness and usefulness in medical image segmentation.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

MAMBO-NET: Multi-Causal Aware Modeling Backdoor-Intervention Optimization for Medical Image Segmentation Network

Medical image segmentation methods generally assume that the process from medical image to segmentation is unbiased, and use neural networks to establish conditional probability models to complete the segmentation task. This assumption does not consider confusion factors, which can affect medical images, such as complex anatomical variations and imaging modality limitations. Confusion factors obfuscate the relevance and causality of medical image segmentation, leading to unsatisfactory segmentation results. To address this issue, we propose a multi-causal aware modeling backdoor-intervention optimization (MAMBO-NET) network for medical image segmentation. Drawing insights from causal inference, MAMBO-NET utilizes self-modeling with multi-Gaussian distributions to fit the confusion factors and introduce causal intervention into the segmentation process. Moreover, we design appropriate posterior probability constraints to effectively train the distributions of confusion factors. For the distributions to effectively guide the segmentation and mitigate and eliminate the Impact of confusion factors on the segmentation, we introduce classical backdoor intervention techniques and analyze their feasibility in the segmentation task. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments on five medical image datasets. The results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the influence of confusion factors, leading to enhanced segmentation accuracy.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

DS-TransUNet:Dual Swin Transformer U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation

Automatic medical image segmentation has made great progress benefit from the development of deep learning. However, most existing methods are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which fail to build long-range dependencies and global context connections due to the limitation of receptive field in convolution operation. Inspired by the success of Transformer in modeling the long-range contextual information, some researchers have expended considerable efforts in designing the robust variants of Transformer-based U-Net. Moreover, the patch division used in vision transformers usually ignores the pixel-level intrinsic structural features inside each patch. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel deep medical image segmentation framework called Dual Swin Transformer U-Net (DS-TransUNet), which might be the first attempt to concurrently incorporate the advantages of hierarchical Swin Transformer into both encoder and decoder of the standard U-shaped architecture to enhance the semantic segmentation quality of varying medical images. Unlike many prior Transformer-based solutions, the proposed DS-TransUNet first adopts dual-scale encoder subnetworks based on Swin Transformer to extract the coarse and fine-grained feature representations of different semantic scales. As the core component for our DS-TransUNet, a well-designed Transformer Interactive Fusion (TIF) module is proposed to effectively establish global dependencies between features of different scales through the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, we also introduce the Swin Transformer block into decoder to further explore the long-range contextual information during the up-sampling process. Extensive experiments across four typical tasks for medical image segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of DS-TransUNet, and show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

An Iterative Boundary Random Walks Algorithm for Interactive Image Segmentation

The interactive image segmentation algorithm can provide an intelligent ways to understand the intention of user input. Many interactive methods have the problem of that ask for large number of user input. To efficient produce intuitive segmentation under limited user input is important for industrial application. In this paper, we reveal a positive feedback system on image segmentation to show the pixels of self-learning. Two approaches, iterative random walks and boundary random walks, are proposed for segmentation potential, which is the key step in feedback system. Experiment results on image segmentation indicates that proposed algorithms can obtain more efficient input to random walks. And higher segmentation performance can be obtained by applying the iterative boundary random walks algorithm.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

BRAU-Net++: U-Shaped Hybrid CNN-Transformer Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for clinical quantification, disease diagnosis, treatment planning and many other applications. Both convolution-based and transformer-based u-shaped architectures have made significant success in various medical image segmentation tasks. The former can efficiently learn local information of images while requiring much more image-specific inductive biases inherent to convolution operation. The latter can effectively capture long-range dependency at different feature scales using self-attention, whereas it typically encounters the challenges of quadratic compute and memory requirements with sequence length increasing. To address this problem, through integrating the merits of these two paradigms in a well-designed u-shaped architecture, we propose a hybrid yet effective CNN-Transformer network, named BRAU-Net++, for an accurate medical image segmentation task. Specifically, BRAU-Net++ uses bi-level routing attention as the core building block to design our u-shaped encoder-decoder structure, in which both encoder and decoder are hierarchically constructed, so as to learn global semantic information while reducing computational complexity. Furthermore, this network restructures skip connection by incorporating channel-spatial attention which adopts convolution operations, aiming to minimize local spatial information loss and amplify global dimension-interaction of multi-scale features. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses other state-of-the-art methods including its baseline: BRAU-Net under almost all evaluation metrics. We achieve the average Dice-Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 82.47, 90.10, and 92.94 on Synapse multi-organ segmentation, ISIC-2018 Challenge, and CVC-ClinicDB, as well as the mIoU of 84.01 and 88.17 on ISIC-2018 Challenge and CVC-ClinicDB, respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Comprehensive Review of U-Net and Its Variants: Advances and Applications in Medical Image Segmentation

Medical images often exhibit low and blurred contrast between lesions and surrounding tissues, with considerable variation in lesion edges and shapes even within the same disease, leading to significant challenges in segmentation. Therefore, precise segmentation of lesions has become an essential prerequisite for patient condition assessment and formulation of treatment plans. Significant achievements have been made in research related to the U-Net model in recent years. It improves segmentation performance and is extensively applied in the semantic segmentation of medical images to offer technical support for consistent quantitative lesion analysis methods. First, this paper classifies medical image datasets on the basis of their imaging modalities and then examines U-Net and its various improvement models from the perspective of structural modifications. The research objectives, innovative designs, and limitations of each approach are discussed in detail. Second, we summarize the four central improvement mechanisms of the U-Net and U-Net variant algorithms: the jump-connection mechanism, residual-connection mechanism, 3D-UNet, and transformer mechanism. Finally, we examine the relationships among the four core enhancement mechanisms and commonly utilized medical datasets and propose potential avenues and strategies for future advancements. This paper provides a systematic summary and reference for researchers in related fields, and we look forward to designing more efficient and stable medical image segmentation network models based on the U-Net network.

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arXiv2026

SMAFormer: Synergistic Multi-Attention Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation

In medical image segmentation, specialized computer vision techniques, notably transformers grounded in attention mechanisms and residual networks employing skip connections, have been instrumental in advancing performance. Nonetheless, previous models often falter when segmenting small, irregularly shaped tumors. To this end, we introduce SMAFormer, an efficient, Transformer-based architecture that fuses multiple attention mechanisms for enhanced segmentation of small tumors and organs. SMAFormer can capture both local and global features for medical image segmentation. The architecture comprises two pivotal components. First, a Synergistic Multi-Attention (SMA) Transformer block is proposed, which has the benefits of Pixel Attention, Channel Attention, and Spatial Attention for feature enrichment. Second, addressing the challenge of information loss incurred during attention mechanism transitions and feature fusion, we design a Feature Fusion Modulator. This module bolsters the integration between the channel and spatial attention by mitigating reshaping-induced information attrition. To evaluate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on various medical image segmentation tasks, including multi-organ, liver tumor, and bladder tumor segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/lzeeorno/SMAFormer.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2007

Hierarchical Markovian models for hyperspectral image segmentation

Hyperspectral images can be represented either as a set of images or as a set of spectra. Spectral classification and segmentation and data reduction are the main problems in hyperspectral image analysis. In this paper we propose a Bayesian estimation approach with an appropriate hiearchical model with hidden markovian variables which gives the possibility to jointly do data reduction, spectral classification and image segmentation. In the proposed model, the desired independent components are piecewise homogeneous images which share the same common hidden segmentation variable. Thus, the joint Bayesian estimation of this hidden variable as well as the sources and the mixing matrix of the source separation problem gives a solution for all the three problems of dimensionality reduction, spectra classification and segmentation of hyperspectral images. A few simulation results illustrate the performances of the proposed method compared to other classical methods usually used in hyperspectral image processing.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2020

CA-Net: Comprehensive Attention Convolutional Neural Networks for Explainable Medical Image Segmentation

Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for diagnosis and treatment planning of diseases. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for automatic medical image segmentation. However, they are still challenged by complicated conditions where the segmentation target has large variations of position, shape and scale, and existing CNNs have a poor explainability that limits their application to clinical decisions. In this work, we make extensive use of multiple attentions in a CNN architecture and propose a comprehensive attention-based CNN (CA-Net) for more accurate and explainable medical image segmentation that is aware of the most important spatial positions, channels and scales at the same time. In particular, we first propose a joint spatial attention module to make the network focus more on the foreground region. Then, a novel channel attention module is proposed to adaptively recalibrate channel-wise feature responses and highlight the most relevant feature channels. Also, we propose a scale attention module implicitly emphasizing the most salient feature maps among multiple scales so that the CNN is adaptive to the size of an object. Extensive experiments on skin lesion segmentation from ISIC 2018 and multi-class segmentation of fetal MRI found that our proposed CA-Net significantly improved the average segmentation Dice score from 87.77% to 92.08% for skin lesion, 84.79% to 87.08% for the placenta and 93.20% to 95.88% for the fetal brain respectively compared with U-Net. It reduced the model size to around 15 times smaller with close or even better accuracy compared with state-of-the-art DeepLabv3+. In addition, it has a much higher explainability than existing networks by visualizing the attention weight maps. Our code is available at https://github.com/HiLab-git/CA-Net

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

A Generalized Surface Loss for Reducing the Hausdorff Distance in Medical Imaging Segmentation

Within medical imaging segmentation, the Dice coefficient and Hausdorff-based metrics are standard measures of success for deep learning models. However, modern loss functions for medical image segmentation often only consider the Dice coefficient or similar region-based metrics during training. As a result, segmentation architectures trained over such loss functions run the risk of achieving high accuracy for the Dice coefficient but low accuracy for Hausdorff-based metrics. Low accuracy on Hausdorff-based metrics can be problematic for applications such as tumor segmentation, where such benchmarks are crucial. For example, high Dice scores accompanied by significant Hausdorff errors could indicate that the predictions fail to detect small tumors. We propose the Generalized Surface Loss function, a novel loss function to minimize Hausdorff-based metrics with more desirable numerical properties than current methods and with weighting terms for class imbalance. Our loss function outperforms other losses when tested on the LiTS and BraTS datasets using the state-of-the-art nnUNet architecture. These results suggest we can improve medical imaging segmentation accuracy with our novel loss function.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2023

Transformer-based Annotation Bias-aware Medical Image Segmentation

Manual medical image segmentation is subjective and suffers from annotator-related bias, which can be mimicked or amplified by deep learning methods. Recently, researchers have suggested that such bias is the combination of the annotator preference and stochastic error, which are modeled by convolution blocks located after decoder and pixel-wise independent Gaussian distribution, respectively. It is unlikely that convolution blocks can effectively model the varying degrees of preference at the full resolution level. Additionally, the independent pixel-wise Gaussian distribution disregards pixel correlations, leading to a discontinuous boundary. This paper proposes a Transformer-based Annotation Bias-aware (TAB) medical image segmentation model, which tackles the annotator-related bias via modeling annotator preference and stochastic errors. TAB employs the Transformer with learnable queries to extract the different preference-focused features. This enables TAB to produce segmentation with various preferences simultaneously using a single segmentation head. Moreover, TAB takes the multivariant normal distribution assumption that models pixel correlations, and learns the annotation distribution to disentangle the stochastic error. We evaluated our TAB on an OD/OC segmentation benchmark annotated by six annotators. Our results suggest that TAB outperforms existing medical image segmentation models which take into account the annotator-related bias.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

SSEGEP: Small SEGment Emphasized Performance evaluation metric for medical image segmentation

Automatic image segmentation is a critical component of medical image analysis, and hence quantifying segmentation performance is crucial. Challenges in medical image segmentation are mainly due to spatial variations of regions to be segmented and imbalance in distribution of classes. Commonly used metrics treat all detected pixels, indiscriminately. However, pixels in smaller segments must be treated differently from pixels in larger segments, as detection of smaller ones aid in early treatment of associated disease and are also easier to miss. To address this, we propose a novel evaluation metric for segmentation performance, emphasizing smaller segments, by assigning higher weightage to smaller segment pixels. Weighted false positives are also considered in deriving the new metric named, "SSEGEP"(Small SEGment Emphasized Performance evaluation metric), (range : 0(Bad) to 1(Good)). The experiments were performed on diverse anatomies(eye, liver, pancreas and breast) from publicly available datasets to show applicability of the proposed metric across different imaging techniques. Mean opinion score (MOS) and statistical significance testing is used to quantify the relevance of proposed approach. Across 33 fundus images, where the largest exudate is 1.41%, and the smallest is 0.0002% of the image, the proposed metric is 30% closer to MOS, as compared to Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC). Statistical significance testing resulted in promising p-value of order 10^{-18} with SSEGEP for hepatic tumor compared to DSC. The proposed metric is found to perform better for the images having multiple segments for a single label.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Accuracy: Uncertainty-Guided Boundary Refinement for Reliable Biomedical Image Segmentation

Accurate biomedical image segmentation requires not only high global overlap but also reliable delineation of clinically meaningful boundaries. In blood-smear microscopy, cytoplasm and nucleus contours provide the structural basis for downstream morphology analysis; however, deep segmentation models may remain uncertain or overconfident near ambiguous boundary regions even when achieving strong Dice scores. This work proposes a Reliability-Aware Boundary Refinement Network (RABR-Net), a two-stage framework for trustworthy image segmentation. A strong UNet++ EfficientNet-B4 base segmenter first produces initial class probabilities and logits. Predictive entropy, test-time augmentation variance, margin uncertainty, probability gradients, and soft boundary cues are then combined into a boundary-aware reliability representation. This representation guides a gated residual refiner that selectively corrects uncertain boundary pixels while preserving confident regions of the base prediction. The framework is evaluated using overlap accuracy, class-wise Dice, Boundary Dice, HD95/ASSD, calibration, risk--coverage analysis, robustness under image perturbations, qualitative correction maps, and paired statistical testing. On the held-out test set, the proposed method improves Dice from 0.9602 to 0.9614, Boundary Dice from 0.3448 to 0.3611, and HD95 from 3.0354 to 2.8274 compared with the cached base prediction. Statistical analysis confirms significant improvements in Dice, Boundary Dice, and HD95. Qualitative results show that the learned gate concentrates around uncertain cytoplasm and nucleus boundaries, and correction maps confirm localized boundary refinement. Although calibration does not automatically improve after refinement, the proposed framework provides an interpretable and reliability-focused strategy for boundary-sensitive biomedical image segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

SeUNet-Trans: A Simple yet Effective UNet-Transformer Model for Medical Image Segmentation

Automated medical image segmentation is becoming increasingly crucial to modern clinical practice, driven by the growing demand for precise diagnosis, the push towards personalized treatment plans, and the advancements in machine learning algorithms, especially the incorporation of deep learning methods. While convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been prevalent among these methods, the remarkable potential of Transformer-based models for computer vision tasks is gaining more acknowledgment. To harness the advantages of both CNN-based and Transformer-based models, we propose a simple yet effective UNet-Transformer (seUNet-Trans) model for medical image segmentation. In our approach, the UNet model is designed as a feature extractor to generate multiple feature maps from the input images, then the maps are propagated into a bridge layer, which is introduced to sequentially connect the UNet and the Transformer. In this stage, we approach the pixel-level embedding technique without position embedding vectors, aiming to make the model more efficient. Moreover, we apply spatial-reduction attention in the Transformer to reduce the computational/memory overhead. By leveraging the UNet architecture and the self-attention mechanism, our model not only retains the preservation of both local and global context information but also is capable of capturing long-range dependencies between input elements. The proposed model is extensively experimented on seven medical image segmentation datasets including polyp segmentation to demonstrate its efficacy. Comparison with several state-of-the-art segmentation models on these datasets shows the superior performance of our proposed seUNet-Trans network.

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