Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation with Large Kernel Attention

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel few-shot medical image segmentation model that employs a large kernel attention module to enhance feature representation, capturing both local and long-range information, leading to state-of-the-art results on MRI datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a plug-and-play attention module integrated into a multi-module framework to improve few-shot segmentation accuracy by capturing comprehensive features.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on CHAOS and CMR MRI datasets.

Effectively captures local and long-range features for improved segmentation.

Outperforms existing few-shot segmentation methods.

Abstract

Medical image segmentation has witnessed significant advancements with the emergence of deep learning. However, the reliance of most neural network models on a substantial amount of annotated data remains a challenge for medical image segmentation. To address this issue, few-shot segmentation methods based on meta-learning have been employed. Presently, the methods primarily focus on aligning the support set and query set to enhance performance, but this approach hinders further improvement of the model's effectiveness. In this paper, our objective is to propose a few-shot medical segmentation model that acquire comprehensive feature representation capabilities, which will boost segmentation accuracy by capturing both local and long-range features. To achieve this, we introduce a plug-and-play attention module that dynamically enhances both query and support features, thereby improving the representativeness of the extracted features. Our model comprises four key modules: a dual-path feature extractor, an attention module, an adaptive prototype prediction module, and a multi-scale prediction fusion module. Specifically, the dual-path feature extractor acquires multi-scale features by obtaining features of 32{\times}32 size and 64{\times}64 size. The attention module follows the feature extractor and captures local and long-range information. The adaptive prototype prediction module automatically adjusts the anomaly score threshold to predict prototypes, while the multi-scale fusion prediction module integrates prediction masks of various scales to produce the final segmentation result. We conducted experiments on publicly available MRI datasets, namely CHAOS and CMR, and compared our method with other advanced techniques. The results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.