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FlowgateUNet: Dental CT image segmentation network based on FlowFormer and gated attention

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Abstract

Segmentation of cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) images plays an important role in clinical treatment as well as teaching. Traditional manual segmentation of dental CBCT images requires tools such as mimics and is time-consuming. With the development of deep learning, the U-shaped network, represented by UNet, has shown good results. Due to the significant improvement brought by various applications of Transformers to image tasks, more and more models try to combine attention mechanism with traditional convolutional neural networks. To further improve the performance of dental CBCT segmentation, this paper proposes an improved FlowgateUNet segmentation network, which uses the FlowFormer instead of Transformer in the encoder to achieve attention computation with nearly linear complexity. It also uses the feature map containing global information as the gating signal in the skip connections to further extract relevant features and fuses the results from multiple decoders as the output. Compared to TransUnet, the proposed FlowgateUnet model improved the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) by 1% on the dental CBCT image dataset, by 0.7% on the dental microCT dataset, and by 2% on the Synapse dataset.

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Data availibility

The CBCT and microCT datasets are not publicly available due to privacy issues

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Acknowledgements

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant U19A2086 and The Yibin campus major construction and educational reform of CDUT: 22100-000047.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Cyber Security, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, 610059, China

    Danhua Cao & Biao Cai

  2. College of Industrial Technology, Chengdu University of Technology, Yibin, 644000, China

    Biao Cai

  3. School of Data Science and Artifical Intelligence, Wenzhou University of Technology, Wenzhou, 325035, China

    Mingzhe Liu

Authors
  1. Danhua Cao
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  2. Biao Cai
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  3. Mingzhe Liu
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Contributions

DC contributed to conceptualization, methodology, software, writing-original draft. BC contributed to conceptualization, methodology, project administration, supervision, writing-review and editing. ML contributed to investigation, funding acquisition, and resources.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Biao Cai.

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Cao, D., Cai, B. & Liu, M. FlowgateUNet: Dental CT image segmentation network based on FlowFormer and gated attention. SIViP 18, 1175–1182 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02765-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02765-y

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