KLO-Net: A Dynamic K-NN Attention U-Net with CSP Encoder for Efficient Prostate Gland Segmentation from MRI

TL;DR

KLO-Net is a novel prostate MRI segmentation model that combines dynamic K-NN attention and CSP encoder to achieve efficient and accurate results suitable for real-time clinical deployment.

Contribution

The paper introduces a dynamic K-NN attention mechanism and CSP encoder in a U-Net architecture for improved efficiency and accuracy in prostate gland segmentation from MRI.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in computational efficiency.

Maintains high segmentation accuracy across datasets.

Reduces memory footprint significantly.

Abstract

Real-time deployment of prostate MRI segmentation on clinical workstations is often bottlenecked by computational load and memory footprint. Deep learning-based prostate gland segmentation approaches remain challenging due to anatomical variability. To bridge this efficiency gap while still maintaining reliable segmentation accuracy, we propose KLO-Net, a dynamic K-Nearest Neighbor attention U-Net with Cross Stage Partial, i.e., CSP, encoder for efficient prostate gland segmentation from MRI scan. Unlike the regular K-NN attention mechanism, the proposed dynamic K-NN attention mechanism allows the model to adaptively determine the number of attention connections for each spatial location within a slice. In addition, CSP blocks address the computational load to reduce memory consumption. To evaluate the model's performance, comprehensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted on two public datasets, i.e., PROMISE12 and PROSTATEx, to validate the proposed architecture. The detailed comparative analysis demonstrates the model's advantage in computational efficiency and segmentation quality.