MFS‐Unet: A Multi‐Path Vision Mamba Network for Precise Thyroid Nodule Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces MFS-Unet, a new network for accurately segmenting thyroid nodules in ultrasound images, using innovative modules to handle blurry boundaries and noisy data.

Contribution

The paper proposes MFS-Unet with three novel modules: MPV, FG, and SLR to improve segmentation accuracy in complex ultrasound images.

Findings

MFS-Unet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public thyroid ultrasound datasets.

The MPV module efficiently captures global context and multi-scale features with linear complexity.

The SLR module effectively handles label noise in training data.

Abstract

The automated segmentation of thyroid nodules from ultrasound images holds significant value in clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, achieving precise segmentation remains a substantial challenge due to issues such as blurred nodule boundaries, variable scales, image noise, and inaccurate annotations. To address these difficulties, this paper proposes a novel medical image segmentation network named MFS‐Unet. The network introduces three innovative modules to enhance segmentation performance. First, we designed the multi‐path vision mamba (MPV) module, which leverages the advantages of state space models (SSMs) to efficiently capture global contextual information and multi‐scale features with linear computational complexity, effectively addressing the problem of significant variations in nodule size. Second, a feature gating (FG) module is deployed in the skip connections between the encoder and decoder. Through an attention mechanism, it dynamically screens and enhances features transmitted from the encoder, suppressing background noise and reinforcing key boundary information of the nodules. Finally, we propose a supervised label rectification (SLR) module, aimed at proactively handling the prevalent issue of label noise in training data. By dynamically adjusting loss weights during training, it guides the model to learn more robust feature representations. We conducted extensive experiments on three public thyroid ultrasound datasets: DDTI, TG3K, and TN3K. The results demonstrate that MFS‐Unet achieves superior performance across all evaluation metrics compared with various state‐of‐the‐art segmentation methods, proving its effectiveness and significant potential for precise thyroid nodule segmentation in complex ultrasound environments.

The network introduces three innovative modules to enhance segmentation performance. First, we designed the multi‐path vision mamba (MPV) module, which leverages the advantages of state space models (SSMs) to efficiently capture global contextual information and multi‐scale features with linear computational complexity, effectively addressing the problem of significant variations in nodule size. Second, a feature gating (FG) module is deployed in the skip connections between the encoder and decoder.

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