Swin-Net: A Swin-Transformer-Based Network Combing with Multi-Scale Features for Segmentation of Breast Tumor Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world, especially among women. Breast tumor segmentation is a key step in the identification and localization of the breast tumor region, which has important clinical significance. Inspired by the swin-transformer model with powerful global modeling ability, we propose a semantic segmentation framework named Swin-Net for breast ultrasound images, which combines Transformer and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to effectively improve the accuracy of breast ultrasound segmentation. Firstly, our model utilizes a swin-transformer encoder with stronger learning ability, which can extract features of images more precisely. In addition, two new modules are introduced in our method, including the feature refinement and enhancement module (RLM) and the hierarchical multi-scale feature fusion module (HFM), given that the influence of ultrasonic image acquisition methods and the characteristics of tumor lesions is difficult to capture. Among them, the RLM module is used to further refine and enhance the feature map learned by the transformer encoder. The HFM module is used to process multi-scale high-level semantic features and low-level details, so as to achieve effective cross-layer feature fusion, suppress noise, and improve model segmentation performance. Experimental results show that Swin-Net performs significantly better than the most advanced methods on the two public benchmark datasets. In particular, it achieves an absolute improvement of 1.4–1.8% on Dice. Additionally, we provide a new dataset of breast ultrasound images on which we test the effect of our model, further demonstrating the validity of our method. In summary, the proposed Swin-Net framework makes significant advancements in breast ultrasound image segmentation, providing valuable exploration for research and applications in this domain.