Category guided attention network for brain tumor segmentation in MRI

• Main Authors: Chen, C. (Author), Ding, M. (Author), Li, J. (Author), Yu, H. (Author), Zha, S. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing Ltd 2022
• Subjects: attention mechanism; Attention mechanisms; Brain; Brain disease; brain tumor segmentation; Brain tumor segmentation; Computational costs; deep learning; Deep learning; Diagnosis; Feature map; Long-range dependencies; magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic resonance imaging; Module-based; Radiation treatments; semantic segmentation; Semantic segmentation; Semantic Segmentation; Semantics; Tumors
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Objective. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been widely used for the analysis and diagnosis of brain diseases. Accurate and automatic brain tumor segmentation is of paramount importance for radiation treatment. However, low tissue contrast in tumor regions makes it a challenging task. Approach. We propose a novel segmentation network named Category Guided Attention U-Net (CGA U-Net). In this model, we design a Supervised Attention Module (SAM) based on the attention mechanism, which can capture more accurate and stable long-range dependency in feature maps without introducing much computational cost. Moreover, we propose an intra-class update approach to reconstruct feature maps by aggregating pixels of the same category. Main results. Experimental results on the BraTS 2019 datasets show that the proposed method outperformers the state-of-the-art algorithms in both segmentation performance and computational complexity. Significance. The CGA U-Net can effectively capture the global semantic information in the MRI image by using the SAM module, while significantly reducing the computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/delugewalker/CGA-U-Net. © 2022 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.