Object Detection in Medical Images Based on Hierarchical Transformer and Mask Mechanism

Abstract

The object detection task in the medical field is challenging in terms of classification and regression. Due to its crucial applications in computer-aided diagnosis and computer-aided detection techniques, an increasing number of researchers are transferring the object detection techniques to the medical field. However, in existing work on object detection, researchers do not consider the low resolution of medical images, the high amount of noise, and the small size of the objects to be detected. Based on this, this paper proposes a new algorithmic model called the MS Transformer, where a self-supervised learning approach is used to perform a random mask on the input image to reconstruct the input features, learn a richer feature vector, and filter out excessive noise. To focus the model on the small objects that are being detected, the hierarchical transformer model is introduced in this paper, and a sliding window with a local self-attention mechanism is used to give a higher attention score to the small objects to be detected. Finally, a single-stage object detection framework is used to predict the sequence of sets at the location of the bounding box and the class of objects to be detected. On the DeepLesion and BCDD benchmark dataset, the model proposed in this paper achieves better performance improvement on multiple evaluation metric categories.