A fusion‐attention swin transformer for cardiac MRI image segmentation

Abstract

AbstractFor semantic segmentation of cardiac magnetic resonance image (MRI) with low recognition and high background noise, a fusion‐attention Swin Transformer is proposed based on cognitive science and deep learning methods. It has a U‐shaped symmetric encoding–decoding structure with an attention‐based skip connection. The encoder realizes self‐attention for deep feature representation and the decoder up‐samples global features to the corresponding input resolution for pixel‐level segmentation. By introducing a skip connection between the encoder and decoder based on fusion attention, the remote interaction of global information is realized, and the attention to local features and specific channels is enhanced. A public ACDC cardiac MRI image dataset is used for experiments. The segmentation of the left ventricle, right ventricle, and myocardial layer is realized. The method performs well on a small sample dataset, for example, the pixel accuracy obtained by the proposed model is 93.68%, the Dice coefficient is 92.28%, and HD coefficient is 11.18. Compared with the state‐of‐the‐art models, the segmentation precision has been significantly improved, especially for the low recognition and heavily occluded targets.