An Efficient Dual-Line Decoder Network with Multi-Scale Convolutional Attention for Multi-organ Segmentation

Abstract

Proper segmentation of organs-at-risk is important for radiation therapy, surgical planning, and diagnostic decision-making in medical image analysis. While deep learning-based segmentation architectures have made significant progress, they often fail to balance segmentation accuracy with computational efficiency. Most of the current state-of-the-art methods either prioritize performance at the cost of high computational complexity or compromise accuracy for efficiency. This paper addresses this gap by introducing an efficient dual-line decoder segmentation network (EDLDNet). The proposed method features a noisy decoder, which learns to incorporate structured perturbation at training time for better model robustness, yet at inference time only the noise-free decoder is executed, leading to lower computational cost. Multi-Scale convolutional Attention Modules (MSCAMs), Attention Gates (AGs), and Up-Convolution Blocks (UCBs) are further utilized to optimize feature representation and boost segmentation performance. By leveraging multi-scale segmentation masks from both decoders, we also utilize a mutation-based loss function to enhance the model's generalization. Our approach outperforms SOTA segmentation architectures on four publicly available medical imaging datasets. EDLDNet achieves SOTA performance with an 84.00% Dice score on the Synapse dataset, surpassing baseline model like UNet by 13.89% in Dice score while significantly reducing Multiply-Accumulate Operations (MACs) by 89.7%. Compared to recent approaches like EMCAD, our EDLDNet not only achieves higher Dice score but also maintains comparable computational efficiency. The outstanding performance across diverse datasets establishes EDLDNet's strong generalization, computational efficiency, and robustness. The source code, pre-processed data, and pre-trained weights will be available at https://github.com/riadhassan/EDLDNet .

After revision, minor ablation studies have been added in the published version in Biomedical Signal Processing and Control (BSPC)

References in corpus (8)

• Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift
• Automated Design of Deep Learning Methods for Biomedical Image Segmentation
• PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer
• MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net Architecture for Multimodal Biomedical Image Segmentation
• Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation
• Polyp-PVT: Polyp Segmentation with Pyramid Vision Transformers
• MISSFormer: An Effective Medical Image Segmentation Transformer
• Accuracy is not the only Metric that matters: Estimating the Energy Consumption of Deep Learning Models