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SCAU-net: 3D self-calibrated attention U-Net for brain tumor segmentation

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Abstract

Recently, U-Net architecture with its strong adaptability has become prevalent in the field of MRI brain tumor segmentation. Meanwhile, researchers have demonstrated that introducing attention mechanisms, especially self-attention, into U-Net can effectively improve the performance of segmentation models. However, the self-attention has disadvantages of heavy computational burden, quadratic complexity as well as ignoring the potential correlations between different samples. Besides, current attention segmentation models seldom focus on adaptively computing the receptive field of tumor images that may capture discriminant information effectively. To address these issues, we propose a novel 3D U-Net related brain tumor segmentation model dubbed as self-calibrated attention U-Net (SCAU-Net) in this work, which simultaneously introduces two lightweight modules, i.e., external attention module and self-calibrated convolution module, into a single U-Net. More specifically, SCAU-Net embeds the external attention into the skip connection to better utilize encoding features for semantic up-sampling, and it leverages several 3D self-calibrated convolution modules to replace the original convolution layers, which adaptively computes the receptive field of tumor images for effective segmentation. SCAU-Net achieves segmentation results on the BraTS 2020 validation dataset with the dice similarity coefficient of 0.905, 0.821 and 0.781 and the 95% Hausdorff distance (HD95) of 4.0, 9.7 and 29.3 on the whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor, respectively. Similarly, competitive results are obtained on BraTS 2018 and BraTS 2019 validation datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SCAU-Net outperforms its baseline and achieves outstanding performance compared to various representative brain tumor models.

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Availability of data and materials

The  datasets  during  the  current  study  are  available  in  the: https://www.cbica.upenn.edu/MICCAI_BraTS2020_TrainingDatahttps://www.cbica.upenn.edu/MICCAI_BraTS2020_ValidationDatahttps://www.cbica.upenn.edu/sbia/Spyridon.Bakas/MICCAI_BraTS/2019/MICCAI_BraTS_2019_Data_Training.ziphttps://www.cbica.upenn.edu/sbia/Spyridon.Bakas/MICCAI_BraTS/2019/MICCAI_BraTS_2019_Data_Validation.zip.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61972062, the NSFC-Liaoning Province United Foundation under Grant U1908214 and the Young and Middle-aged Talents Program of the National Civil Affairs Commission.

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Author notes

  1. Dongwei Liu and Ning Sheng contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Dalian Minzu University, No.18, Liaohe West Road, Jinzhou New District, Dalian, 116600, China

    Dongwei Liu, Yutong Han & Jianxin Zhang

  2. Key Lab of Advanced Design and Intelligent Computing (Ministry of Education), Dalian University, No. 10, Xuefu Street, Dalian Economic and Technological Development Zone, Dalian, 116622, China

    Ning Sheng, Jianxin Zhang & Qiang Zhang

  3. School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, No.2, Linggong Road, Ganjingzi District, Dalian, 116024, China

    Yaqing Hou & Qiang Zhang

  4. International School of Information Science and Engineering (DUT-RUISE), Dalian University of Technology, No.321, Tuqian Road, Jinazhou New District, Dalian, 116620, China

    Bin Liu

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Correspondence to Jianxin Zhang.

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Liu, D., Sheng, N., Han, Y. et al. SCAU-net: 3D self-calibrated attention U-Net for brain tumor segmentation. Neural Comput & Applic 35, 23973–23985 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-023-08872-8

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