Multi-scale Superpixel based Hierarchical Attention model for brain CT classification

Abstract

Brain CT image classification is critical for assisting brain disease diagnosis. The brain CT images contain much noisy information, and the lesions are unstable in shape and location, making the classification task more difficult when using conventional CNN models. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-scale Superpixel based Hierarchical Attention (MSHA) model for brain CT classification by introducing the multi-scale superpixels to a hierarchical fusion structure to remove noise and help the model focus on the lesion areas. MSHA contains three modules: (1) a Semantic-level Information Extractor that extracts appearance and geometry information based on the superpixel of the image, (2) a Mixed Multi-head Attention module that obtains the mixed attention features from the semantic-level information, and (3) a Hierarchical Fusion Structure that fuses the multi-scale attention features from coarse to fine. Experiments on the brain CT dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.