Medical image segmentation network based on feature filtering with low number of parameters

Abstract

In recent years, the medical image segmentation method based on hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) has made great progress, but it still faces the challenge of unbalanced global and local modeling, and excessive parameters. In addition, ViT repeatedly uses the whole feature map to model the global information, thus generating irrelevant and weakly related information, which will weaken the performance of the model when facing small datasets and segmentation targets. Therefore, this paper proposes a feature screening network based on similarity, named Screening Feature (SF)-MixedNet. Specifically, this paper first proposes a new feature extractor, namely Correlation based Similarity Transformer (CSimFormer). On the basis of parameter pruning, it uses the Screening Feature Multi-head Self Attention (SF-MSA) to establish the remote dependency, and calculates the similarity between local elements through the Location-Sensitive Mechanism (LsM) to obtain the weight matrix. Then, the correlation between regional elements is mined by Region Matching and Selection (RMS) mechanism, and the obtained information is filtered according to the corresponding rules to reduce the side effects of redundant information. Extensive experiments on Synapse dataset, ACDC dataset and SegPC-2021 dataset show that the segmentation accuracy reaches 83.51%, 92.20% and 81.27% respectively. Especially in the Synapse dataset, our method is 6.31% higher than the baseline. The method proposed in this paper effectively improves the segmentation accuracy, provides more detailed information for medical diagnosis and promotes the development of medical artificial intelligence technology.