PAMSNet: A medical image segmentation network based on spatial pyramid and attention mechanism

Abstract

The image segmentation of diseases can help clinical diagnosis and treatment in medical image analysis. Due to the complexity of lesion features (e.g., size, location, and morphology) and the high similarity between the background and the target area in medical images, semantic features are difficult to extract completely. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel medical image segmentation network PAMSNet based on the spatial pyramid and attention mechanism. By using efficient pyramid attention and channel spatial attention modules, the proposed method fuses the extracted multi-scale spatial information with the local features extracted by the encoder to supplement the image details. In addition, the Spatial Pyramid-Coordinate Attention (SPCA) module is introduced in the bottleneck layer to obtain larger receptive field information and enhance feature extraction. We conducted qualitative and quantitative evaluations on four public datasets, including ISIC2018, Lung segmentation, Kvasir-SEG, and ISLES2022. The segmentation accuracy of DSC was 87.86%, 98.18%, 82.43%, and 87.37%, respectively. The ablation study of each part of PAMSNet proves the validity of each component, and the comparison with state-of-the-art methods on different indicators proves the predominance of the network.