2024/06/09 by Khaled Alrfou, Tian Zhao, Alrfou, Khaled +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · Neuroscience · #Brain Tumor Detection and Classification #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Medical Image Segmentation Techniques #Medical Imaging and Analysis #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.05891
openalex publication_date 2024/06/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Medical image segmentation is crucial for disease diagnosis and monitoring. Though effective, the current segmentation networks such as UNet struggle with capturing long-range features. More accurate models such as TransUNet, Swin-UNet, and CS-UNet have higher computation complexity. To address this problem, we propose GCtx-UNet, a lightweight segmentation architecture that can capture global and local image features with accuracy better or comparable to the state-of-the-art approaches. GCtx-UNet uses vision transformer that leverages global context self-attention modules joined with local self-attention to model long and short range spatial dependencies. GCtx-UNet is evaluated on the Synapse multi-organ abdominal CT dataset, the ACDC cardiac MRI dataset, and several polyp segmentation datasets. In terms of Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Hausdorff Distance (HD) metrics, GCtx-UNet outperformed CNN-based and Transformer-based approaches, with notable gains in the segmentation of complex and small anatomical structures. Moreover, GCtx-UNet is much more efficient than the state-of-the-art approaches with smaller model size, lower computation workload, and faster training and inference speed, making it a practical choice for clinical applications.