Clinical target segmentation using a novel deep neural network: double attention Res-U-Net

Abstract

We introduced Double Attention Res-U-Net architecture to address medical image segmentation problem in different medical imaging system. Accurate medical image segmentation suffers from some challenges including, difficulty of different interest object modeling, presence of noise, and signal dropout throughout the measurement. The base line image segmentation approaches are not sufficient for complex target segmentation throughout the various medical image types. To overcome the issues, a novel U-Net-based model proposed that consists of two consecutive networks with five and four encoding and decoding levels respectively. In each of networks, there are four residual blocks between the encoder-decoder path and skip connections that help the networks to tackle the vanishing gradient problem, followed by the multi-scale attention gates to generate richer contextual information. To evaluate our architecture, we investigated three distinct data-sets, (i.e., CVC-ClinicDB dataset, Multi-site MRI dataset, and a collected ultrasound dataset). The proposed algorithm achieved Dice and Jaccard coefficients of 95.79%, 91.62%, respectively for CRL, and 93.84% and 89.08% for fetal foot segmentation. Moreover, the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art U-Net based model on the external CVC-ClinicDB, and multi-site MRI datasets with Dice and Jaccard coefficients of 83%, 75.31% for CVC-ClinicDB, and 92.07% and 87.14% for multi-site MRI dataset, respectively.