Abstract
In current medical image segmentation tasks, the combined transformer and convolutional architectures excel in capturing global cues and local details, but still pose two main concerns from a layer-level perspective: (1) intra-layer issue: the existing methods inefficiently obtain and fuse global-local information, potentially resulting in incomplete feature extraction; (2) inter-layer issue: the most of methods follow the classical U-shape structure, which inevitably leads to information weakening in the encoder-decoder. In light of these, we propose InjectionNet from the perspective of layers, mainly comprising the Intra-layer Global-Local Injection (GLI) module and Inter-layer Weight Injection (WI) modules. GLI employs multi-scale convolution for local information extraction and flexibly uses a multi-head self-attention mechanism for efficiently capturing global information and fusing them effectively. WI enhances information transfer by injecting generated feature weights, with different variants to suit various network stages. Extensive experiments on three medical imaging public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of InjectionNet compared to previous works.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
O. Ronneberger, P. Fischer, and T. Brox, “U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation,” in Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2015: 18th International Conference, Munich, Germany, October 5-9, 2015, Proceedings, Part III 18. Springer, 2015, pp. 234–241.
J. Chen, Y. Lu, Q. Yu, X. Luo, E. Adeli, Y. Wang, L. Lu, A. L. Yuille, and Y. Zhou, “Transunet: Transformers make strong encoders for medical image segmentation,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.04306
Z. Liu, Y. Lin, Y. Cao, H. Hu, Y. Wei, Z. Zhang, S. Lin, and B. Guo, “Swin transformer: Hierarchical vision transformer using shifted windows,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision, 2021, pp. 10 012–10 022
J. Guo, K. Han, H. Wu, Y. Tang, X. Chen, Y. Wang, and C. Xu, “Cmt: Convolutional neural networks meet vision transformers,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2022, pp. 12 175–12 185
R. Azad, Y. Jia, E. K. Aghdam, J. Cohen-Adad, and D. Merhof, “Enhancing medical image segmentation with transception: A multi-scale feature fusion approach,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.10847, 2023
Zhang, Y., Liu, H., Hu, Q.: TransFuse: Fusing Transformers and CNNs for Medical Image Segmentation. In: de Bruijne, M., Cattin, P.C., Cotin, S., Padoy, N., Speidel, S., Zheng, Y., Essert, C. (eds.) MICCAI 2021. LNCS, vol. 12901, pp. 14–24. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87193-2_2
H. Huang, S. Xie, L. Lin, Y. Iwamoto, X.-H. Han, Y.-W. Chen, and R. Tong, “Scaleformer: Revisiting the transformer-based backbones from a scale-wise perspective for medical image segmentation.”
Y. Xie, Y. Huang, Y. Zhang, X. Li, X. Ye, and K. Hu, “Transwnet: Integrating transformers into cnns via row and column attention for abdominal multi-organ segmentation,” in ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 2023, pp. 1–5
Pan, Z., Zhuang, B., He, H., Liu, J., Cai, J.: Less is more: Pay less attention in vision transformers. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 36(2), 2035–2043 (2022)
W. Lin, Z. Wu, J. Chen, J. Huang, and L. Jin, “Scale-aware modulation meet transformer,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.08579, 2023
F. Milletari, N. Navab, and S.-A. Ahmadi, “V-net: Fully convolutional neural networks for volumetric medical image segmentation,” in 2016 fourth international conference on 3D vision (3DV). Ieee, 2016, pp. 565–571
O. Oktay, J. Schlemper, L. L. Folgoc, M. Lee, M. Heinrich, K. Misawa, K. Mori, S. McDonagh, N. Y. Hammerla, B. Kainz et al., “Attention u-net: Learning where to look for the pancreas,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03999, 2018
Wang, H., Cao, P., Wang, J., Zaiane, O.R.: Uctransnet: rethinking the skip connections in u-net from a channel-wise perspective with transformer. Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence 36(3), 2441–2449 (2022)
H. Wang, S. Xie, L. Lin, Y. Iwamoto, X.-H. Han, Y.-W. Chen, and R. Tong, “Mixed transformer u-net for medical image segmentation,” in ICASSP 2022-2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 2022, pp. 2390–2394
M. Heidari, A. Kazerouni, M. Soltany, R. Azad, E. K. Aghdam, J. Cohen-Adad, and D. Merhof, “Hiformer: Hierarchical multi-scale representations using transformers for medical image segmentation,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 2023, pp. 6202–6212
X. Huang, Z. Deng, D. Li, and X. Yuan, “Missformer: An effective medical image segmentation transformer,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.07162, 2021
C. You, R. Zhao, F. Liu, S. Dong, S. Chinchali, U. Topcu, L. Staib, and J. Duncan, “Class-aware adversarial transformers for medical image segmentation,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 35, pp. 29 582–29 596, 2022
R. Azad, M. Heidari, Y. Wu, and D. Merhof, “Contextual attention network: Transformer meets u-net,” in International Workshop on Machine Learning in Medical Imaging. Springer, 2022, pp. 377–386
Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (62273150) and Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (22ZR1421000).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhu, X., Li, J., Wen, Y. (2025). InjectionNet: Realizing Information Injection for Medical Image Segmentation with Layer Relationships. In: Antonacopoulos, A., Chaudhuri, S., Chellappa, R., Liu, CL., Bhattacharya, S., Pal, U. (eds) Pattern Recognition. ICPR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78312-8_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78312-8_30
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-78311-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-78312-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)