TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；PAII Inc.（PAII公司）
Jieneng Chen, Yongyi Lu, Qihang Yu, Xiangde Luo, Ehsan Adeli, Yan Wang, Le Lu, Alan L. Yuille, Yuyin Zhou
Medical image segmentation is an essential prerequisite for developing healthcare systems, especially for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. On various medical image segmentation tasks, the u-shaped architecture, also known as U-Net, has become the de-facto standard and achieved tremendous success. However, due to the intrinsic locality of convolution operations, U-Net generally demonstrates limitations in explicitly modeling long-range dependency. Transformers, designed for sequence-to-sequence prediction, have emerged as alternative architectures with innate global self-attention mechanisms, but can result in limited localization abilities due to insufficient low-level details. In this paper, we propose TransUNet, which merits both Transformers and U-Net, as a strong alternative for medical image segmentation. On one hand, the Transformer encodes tokenized image patches from a convolution neural network (CNN) feature map as the input sequence for extracting global contexts. On the other hand, the decoder upsamples the encoded features which are then combined with the high-resolution CNN feature maps to enable precise localization.
We argue that Transformers can serve as strong encoders for medical image segmentation tasks, with the combination of U-Net to enhance finer details by recovering localized spatial information. TransUNet achieves superior performances to various competing methods on different medical applications including multi-organ segmentation and cardiac segmentation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Beckschen/TransUNet.
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Medical Biometrics Perception and Analysis Engineering Laboratory（深圳市医学生物特征感知与分析工程实验室）；Bio-Computing Research Center（生物计算研究中心）；Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Visual Object Detection and Recognition（深圳市视觉目标检测与识别重点实验室）
Automatic medical image segmentation has made great progress benefit from the development of deep learning. However, most existing methods are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which fail to build long-range dependencies and global context connections due to the limitation of receptive field in convolution operation. Inspired by the success of Transformer in modeling the long-range contextual information, some researchers have expended considerable efforts in designing the robust variants of Transformer-based U-Net. Moreover, the patch division used in vision transformers usually …
3D TransUNet: Advancing Medical Image Segmentation through Vision Transformers
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
U-Nets have achieved tremendous success in medical image segmentation. Nevertheless, it may suffer limitations in global (long-range) contextual interactions and edge-detail preservation. In contrast, Transformer has an excellent ability to capture long-range dependencies by leveraging the self-attention mechanism into the encoder. Although Transformer was born to model the long-range dependency on the extracted feature maps, it still suffers from extreme computational and spatial complexities in processing high-resolution 3D feature maps. This motivates us to design the efficiently Transforme…
DA-TransUNet: Integrating Spatial and Channel Dual Attention with Transformer U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation
Hangzhou Medical College（杭州医学院）；Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本北陆先端科学技术大学院大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Osaka University（大阪大学）；Hosei University（法政大学）
本文提出 DA-TransUNet，在 U 形编解码结构中结合 Transformer 与空间、通道双重注意力块，以增强多类特征融合并提升医学图像分割精度与效率。
We propose Video-TransUNet, a deep architecture for instance segmentation in medical CT videos constructed by integrating temporal feature blending into the TransUNet deep learning framework. In particular, our approach amalgamates strong frame representation via a ResNet CNN backbone, multi-frame feature blending via a Temporal Context Module (TCM), non-local attention via a Vision Transformer, and reconstructive capabilities for multiple targets via a UNet-based convolutional-deconvolutional architecture with multiple heads. We show that this new network design can significantly outperform o…
In this paper, we propose a novel medical image segmentation using iterative deep learning framework. We have combined an iterative learning approach and an encoder-decoder network to improve segmentation results, which enables to precisely localize the regions of interest (ROIs) including complex shapes or detailed textures of medical images in an iterative manner. The proposed iterative deep convolutional encoder-decoder network consists of two main paths: convolutional encoder path and convolutional decoder path with iterative learning. Experimental results show that the proposed iterative …
L2GNet: Optimal Local-to-Global Representation of Anatomical Structures for Generalized Medical Image Segmentation
Northwestern University（西北大学）；Beth Israel Lahey Health, University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine（马萨诸塞大学陈医学院贝斯以色列拉希医疗中心）；TCS Research（塔塔咨询服务研究中心）；University of South Dakota（南达科他大学）
Wuhan Institute of Technology（武汉工程大学）；Huazhong University of Science and technology（华中科技大学）
Medical image segmentation plays an essential role in developing computer-assisted diagnosis and therapy systems, yet still faces many challenges. In the past few years, the popular encoder-decoder architectures based on CNNs (e.g., U-Net) have been successfully applied in the task of medical image segmentation. However, due to the locality of convolution operations, they demonstrate limitations in learning global context and long-range spatial relations. Recently, several researchers try to introduce transformers to both the encoder and decoder components with promising results, but the effic…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved promising results in medical image segmentation. However, CNNs require lots of training data and are incapable of handling pose and deformation of objects. Furthermore, their pooling layers tend to discard important information such as positions as well as CNNs are sensitive to rotation and affine transformation. Capsule network is a recent new architecture that has achieved better robustness in part-whole representation learning by replacing pooling layers with dynamic routing and convolutional strides, which has shown potential results on po…
TAMISeg: Text-Aligned Multi-scale Medical Image Segmentation with Semantic Encoder Distillation
Department of Data Science and AI, Monash University（蒙纳士大学数据科学与人工智能系）；College of Computer Science, Chongqing University（重庆大学计算机学院）；Chongqing University Central Hospital, School of Medicine（重庆大学附属中心医院医学院）
BEFUnet: A Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architecture for Precise Medical Image Segmentation
School of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科学技术大学电气工程学院）；University College of Nabi Akram（纳比·阿克拉姆大学学院）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Iran（伊朗加兹温分校电气工程系）
LEAF: Latent Diffusion with Efficient Encoder Distillation for Aligned Features in Medical Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China（计算机科学与工程学院，中山大学）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, United States（生物医学工程系，约翰霍普金斯大学）
UNet and its latest extensions like TransUNet have been the leading medical image segmentation methods in recent years. However, these networks cannot be effectively adopted for rapid image segmentation in point-of-care applications as they are parameter-heavy, computationally complex and slow to use. To this end, we propose UNeXt which is a Convolutional multilayer perceptron (MLP) based network for image segmentation. We design UNeXt in an effective way with an early convolutional stage and a MLP stage in the latent stage. We propose a tokenized MLP block where we efficiently tokenize and pr…
SAM2-UNet: Segment Anything 2 Makes Strong Encoder for Natural and Medical Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer and Information Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学计算机与信息工程学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Monash University（墨尔本大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）；Smart Hospital Research Institute, Peking University Shenzhen Hospital（北京大学深圳医院智能医院研究所）
CDPDNet: Integrating Text Guidance with Hybrid Vision Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation
J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida（J. Crayton Pruitt家庭生物医学工程系，佛罗里达大学）；Department of Medicine, University of Florida（医学系，佛罗里达大学）
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学深圳大数据研究院）
Aggregating multi-level feature representation plays a critical role in achieving robust volumetric medical image segmentation, which is important for the auxiliary diagnosis and treatment. Unlike the recent neural architecture search (NAS) methods that typically searched the optimal operators in each network layer, but missed a good strategy to search for feature aggregations, this paper proposes a novel NAS method for 3D medical image segmentation, named UXNet, which searches both the scale-wise feature aggregation strategies as well as the block-wise operators in the encoder-decoder network…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；SenseBrain（感知大脑公司）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence（感知与交互智能中心）
Transformer architecture has emerged to be successful in a number of natural language processing tasks. However, its applications to medical vision remain largely unexplored. In this study, we present UTNet, a simple yet powerful hybrid Transformer architecture that integrates self-attention into a convolutional neural network for enhancing medical image segmentation. UTNet applies self-attention modules in both encoder and decoder for capturing long-range dependency at different scales with minimal overhead. To this end, we propose an efficient self-attention mechanism along with relative pos…
MOSformer: Momentum encoder-based inter-slice fusion transformer for medical image segmentation
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室，自动化研究所，中国科学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（人工智能学院，中国科学院大学）；Department of Vascular Surgery, Peking Union Medical College Hospital（血管外科部门，北京协和医科大学医院）
Convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have achieved great successes in medical image segmentation, but their capability to learn global representations is still limited due to using small effective receptive fields of convolution operations. Transformer based methods are capable of modelling long-range dependencies of information for capturing global representations, yet their ability to model local context is lacking. Integrating CNN and Transformer to learn both local and global representations while exploring multi-scale features is instrumental in further improving medical image…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
The CNN-based methods have achieved impressive results in medical image segmentation, but they failed to capture the long-range dependencies due to the inherent locality of the convolution operation. Transformer-based methods are recently popular in vision tasks because of their capacity for long-range dependencies and promising performance. However, it lacks in modeling local context. In this paper, taking medical image segmentation as an example, we present MISSFormer, an effective and powerful Medical Image Segmentation tranSFormer. MISSFormer is a hierarchical encoder-decoder network with …
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学深圳大数据研究院）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Medical vision-and-language pre-training (Med-VLP) has received considerable attention owing to its applicability to extracting generic vision-and-language representations from medical images and texts. Most existing methods mainly contain three elements: uni-modal encoders (i.e., a vision encoder and a language encoder), a multi-modal fusion module, and pretext tasks, with few studies considering the importance of medical domain expert knowledge and explicitly exploiting such knowledge to facilitate Med-VLP. Although there exist knowledge-enhanced vision-and-language pre-training (VLP) method…
PMR-Net: Parallel Multi-Resolution Encoder-Decoder Network Framework for Medical Image Segmentation
Shaanxi University of Science and Technology（陕西科技大学）；School of Electronic Information and Artificial Intelligence, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology（陕西科技大学电子信息与人工智能学院）
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Automatic medical image segmentation based on Computed Tomography (CT) has been widely applied for computer-aided surgery as a prerequisite. With the development of deep learning technologies, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown robust performance in automated semantic segmentation of medical images. However, semantic segmentation algorithms based on DCNNs still meet the challenges of feature loss between encoder and decoder, multi-scale object, restricted field of view of filters, and lack of medical image data. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for automated vertebrae s…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Space-based infrared tiny ship detection aims at separating tiny ships from the images captured by earth orbiting satellites. Due to the extremely large image coverage area (e.g., thousands square kilometers), candidate targets in these images are much smaller, dimer, more changeable than those targets observed by aerial-based and land-based imaging devices. Existing short imaging distance-based infrared datasets and target detection methods cannot be well adopted to the space-based surveillance task. To address these problems, we develop a space-based infrared tiny ship detection dataset (nam…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）
In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved milestones in medical image analysis. Especially, the deep neural networks based on U-shaped architecture and skip-connections have been widely applied in a variety of medical image tasks. However, although CNN has achieved excellent performance, it cannot learn global and long-range semantic information interaction well due to the locality of the convolution operation. In this paper, we propose Swin-Unet, which is an Unet-like pure Transformer for medical image segmentation. The tokenized image patches are fed into the …
