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MCA-Net: multi-cascade attention network for polyp segmentation

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Abstract

Accurate polyp segmentation is crucial for diagnosing colorectal cancer, but it remains challenging due to shape, texture, and scale variations, as well as difficulties in determining boundaries. Existing methods incorporating attention mechanisms have improved accuracy but lack effective fusion of different level features. Besides, extracting boundary information from surrounding mucosa and early polyps poses challenges. To tackle these issues, a multi-cascade attention-based network (MCA-Net) is proposed. Three components are introduced, including an axial receptive module (ARM), a multi-cascade feature aggregation module (MFA), and an edge fusion module (EFM). The ARM enhances multi-scale analysis by incorporating receptive fields and axial attention, providing the algorithm with a better knowledge of the features. Along with the integration of multi-cascade supervision, MFA selectively refines the information, effectively fusing relevant cues from different levels, suppressing background noise, and highlighting essential polyp features. The EFM focuses on capturing object boundary details, resulting in well-defined and accurate segmentation. Experiment results on five polyp datasets show that our MCA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Specifically, our MCA-Net achieves an 8.2% improvement in mean Dice compared to the state-of-the-art on the ETIS dataset.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFB0804202, 2018YFB0804203), Regional Joint Fund of NSFC (U19A2057), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61876070), Jilin University “Interdisciplinary Integration and Innovation” Young Scholars Free Exploration Project (JLUXKJC2021QZ01), Jilin Province Science and Technology Development Plan Project (20190303134SF), Anhui University Collaborative Innovation Project Subproject (GXXT-2021-008). The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Software, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yitong Liu

  2. College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yitong Liu, Xuanjing Shen & Xue Wang

  3. Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Xuanjing Shen & Xue Wang

  4. Public Computer Education and Research Center, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yingda Lyu

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  1. Yitong Liu
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Correspondence to Yingda Lyu.

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Liu, Y., Shen, X., Lyu, Y. et al. MCA-Net: multi-cascade attention network for polyp segmentation. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 33713–33730 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-16805-9

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