Prior Attention Network for Multi-Lesion Segmentation in Medical Images.

The accurate segmentation of multiple types of lesions from adjacent tissues in medical images is significant in clinical practice. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based on the coarse-to-fine strategy have been widely used in this field. However, multi-lesion segmentation remains to be challenging due to the uncertainty in size, contrast, and high interclass similarity of tissues. In addition, the commonly adopted cascaded strategy is rather demanding in terms of hardware, which limits the potential of clinical deployment. To address the problems above, we propose a novel Prior Attention Network (PANet) that follows the coarse-to-fine strategy to perform multi-lesion segmentation in medical images. The proposed network achieves the two steps of segmentation in a single network by inserting a lesion-related spatial attention mechanism in the network. Further, we also propose the intermediate supervision strategy for generating lesion-related attention to acquire the regions of interest (ROIs), which accelerates the convergence and obviously improves the segmentation performance. We have investigated the proposed segmentation framework in two applications: 2D segmentation of multiple lung infections in lung CT slices and 3D segmentation of multiple lesions in brain MRIs. Experimental results show that in both 2D and 3D segmentation tasks our proposed network achieves better performance with less computational cost compared with cascaded networks. The proposed network can be regarded as a universal solution to multi-lesion segmentation in both 2D and 3D tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/hsiangyuzhao/PANet.

D2A U-Net: Automatic segmentation of COVID-19 CT slices based on dual attention and hybrid dilated convolution.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become one of the most urgent public health events worldwide due to its high infectivity and mortality. Computed tomography (CT) is a significant screening tool for COVID-19 infection, and automatic segmentation of lung infection in COVID-19 CT images can assist diagnosis and health care of patients. However, accurate and automatic segmentation of COVID-19 lung infections is faced with a few challenges, including blurred edges of infection and relatively low sensitivity. To address the issues above, a novel dilated dual attention U-Net based on the dual attention strategy and hybrid dilated convolutions, namely D2A U-Net, is proposed for COVID-19 lesion segmentation in CT slices. In our D2A U-Net, the dual attention strategy composed of two attention modules is utilized to refine feature maps and reduce the semantic gap between different levels of feature maps. Moreover, the hybrid dilated convolutions are introduced to the model decoder to achieve larger receptive fields, which refines the decoding process. The proposed method is evaluated on an open-source dataset and achieves a Dice score of 0.7298 and recall score of 0.7071, which outperforms the popular cutting-edge methods in the semantic segmentation. The proposed network is expected to be a potential AI-based approach used for the diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 patients.