CANet: Channel Extending and Axial Attention Catching Network for Multi-structure Kidney Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CANet, a novel neural network architecture that enhances multi-structure kidney segmentation by extending channels and incorporating axial attention, leading to improved accuracy in complex anatomical detail extraction.

Contribution

The paper presents a new network, CANet, based on nn-UNet, with channel extension and axial attention modules for better multi-structure kidney segmentation.

Findings

Achieved high dice scores on KiPA2022 dataset

Placed fourth in the challenge

Enhanced edge detail refinement

Abstract

Renal cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers worldwide. Clinical signs of kidney cancer include hematuria and low back discomfort, which are quite distressing to the patient. Some surgery-based renal cancer treatments like laparoscopic partial nephrectomy relys on the 3D kidney parsing on computed tomography angiography (CTA) images. Many automatic segmentation techniques have been put forward to make multi-structure segmentation of the kidneys more accurate. The 3D visual model of kidney anatomy will help clinicians plan operations accurately before surgery. However, due to the diversity of the internal structure of the kidney and the low grey level of the edge. It is still challenging to separate the different parts of the kidney in a clear and accurate way. In this paper, we propose a channel extending and axial attention catching Network(CANet) for multi-structure kidney segmentation. Our solution is founded based on the thriving nn-UNet architecture. Firstly, by extending the channel size, we propose a larger network, which can provide a broader perspective, facilitating the extraction of complex structural information. Secondly, we include an axial attention catching(AAC) module in the decoder, which can obtain detailed information for refining the edges. We evaluate our CANet on the KiPA2022 dataset, achieving the dice scores of 95.8%, 89.1%, 87.5% and 84.9% for kidney, tumor, artery and vein, respectively, which helps us get fourth place in the challenge.