AEC-Net: Attention and Edge Constraint Network for Medical Image Segmentation
Jingyi Wang, Xu Zhao, Qingtian Ning, Dahong Qian · 2020
Semantic segmentation is a fundamental and challenging problem in medical image analysis. At present, deep convolutional neural network plays a dominant role in medical image segmentation. The existing problems of this field are making less use of image information and learning few edge features, which may lead to the ambiguous boundary and inhomogeneous intensity distribution of the result. Since the characteristics of different stages are highly inconsistent, these two cannot be directly combined. In this paper, we proposed the Attention and Edge Constraint Network (AEC-Net) to optimize features by introducing attention mechanisms in the lower-level features, so that it can be better combined with higher-level features. Meanwhile, an edge branch is added to the network which can learn edge and texture features simultaneously. We evaluated this model on three datasets, including skin cancer segmentation, vessel segmentation, and lung segmentation. Results demonstrate that the proposed model has achieved state-of-the-art performance on all datasets.