CiT-Net: Convolutional neural networks hand in hand with vision transformers for medical image segmentation

T Lei, R Sun, X Wang, Y Wang, X He… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2023 - arxiv.org
T Lei, R Sun, X Wang, Y Wang, X He, A Nandi
arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03373, 2023arxiv.org
The hybrid architecture of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer are very
popular for medical image segmentation. However, it suffers from two challenges. First,
although a CNNs branch can capture the local image features using vanilla convolution, it
cannot achieve adaptive feature learning. Second, although a Transformer branch can
capture the global features, it ignores the channel and cross-dimensional self-attention,
resulting in a low segmentation accuracy on complex-content images. To address these …
The hybrid architecture of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer are very popular for medical image segmentation. However, it suffers from two challenges. First, although a CNNs branch can capture the local image features using vanilla convolution, it cannot achieve adaptive feature learning. Second, although a Transformer branch can capture the global features, it ignores the channel and cross-dimensional self-attention, resulting in a low segmentation accuracy on complex-content images. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hybrid architecture of convolutional neural networks hand in hand with vision Transformers (CiT-Net) for medical image segmentation. Our network has two advantages. First, we design a dynamic deformable convolution and apply it to the CNNs branch, which overcomes the weak feature extraction ability due to fixed-size convolution kernels and the stiff design of sharing kernel parameters among different inputs. Second, we design a shifted-window adaptive complementary attention module and a compact convolutional projection. We apply them to the Transformer branch to learn the cross-dimensional long-term dependency for medical images. Experimental results show that our CiT-Net provides better medical image segmentation results than popular SOTA methods. Besides, our CiT-Net requires lower parameters and less computational costs and does not rely on pre-training. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/SR0920/CiT-Net.
arxiv.org