Traditionally, to improve the segmentation performance of models, most approaches prefer to use more complex modules. This is not suitable for the medical field, especially for mobile medical devices, where computationally loaded models are not suitable for real clinical environments due to computational resource constraints. Recently, state-space models, represented by Mamba, have become a strong competitor to traditional convolutional neural networks and transformers. In this paper, we deeply explore the key elements of parameter influence in Mamba and propose an UltraLight Vision Mamba UNet (UltraLight VM-UNet) based on this. Specifically, we propose a method for processing features in parallel Vision Mamba, named the PVM Layer, which achieves competitive performance with the lowest computational complexity while keeping the overall number of processing channels constant. We conducted segmentation experiments on three public datasets of skin lesions and showed that UltraLight VM-UNet exhibits competitive performance with only 0.049M parameters and 0.060 GFLOPs.
10 October 2023 in Biomedical Signal Processing and Control
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has shown exceptional versatility in segmentation tasks across various natural image scenarios. However, its application to medical image segmentation poses significant challenges due to the intricate anatomical details and domain-specific characteristics inherent in medical images. To address these challenges, we propose a novel VMamba adapter framework that integrates a lightweight, trainable Visual Mamba (VMamba) branch with the pre-trained SAM ViT encoder. The VMamba adapter accurately captures multi-scale contextual correlations, integrates global and local information, and reduces ambiguities arising from local features only. Specifically, we propose a novel cross-branch attention (CBA) mechanism to facilitate effective interaction between the SAM and VMamba branches. This mechanism enables the model to learn and adapt more efficiently to the nuances of medical images, extracting rich, complementary features that enhance its representational capacity. Beyond architectural enhancements, we streamline the segmentation workflow by eliminating the need for prompt-driven input mechanisms. This results in an autonomous prediction model that reduces manual input requirements and improves operational efficiency. In addition, our method introduces only minimal additional trainable parameters, offering an efficient solution for medical image segmentation. Extensive evaluations of four medical image datasets demonstrate that our VMamba adapter framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, on the ACDC dataset with limited training data, our method achieves an average Dice coefficient improvement of 0.18 and reduces the Hausdorff distance by 20.38 mm compared to the AutoSAM.
10 September 2024 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Ultra-wide field (UWF) retinal imaging can improve the detection rate of retinal hemorrhage as compared with conventional fundus images. However, hemorrhages in UWF retinal images can also become smaller and more widely distributed, which can be time consuming and labor intensive. With the development of computer technology, automatic segmentation techniques can assist physicians in diagnosis. However, the lack of publicly available UWF retinal hemorrhage segmentation datasets has limited the development of automatic hemorrhage segmentation techniques in UWF retinal images. We present a large-scale high-quality UWF retinal hemorrhage segmentation dataset, named UWF-RHS Dataset, for public use. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first team to make the UWF retinal hemorrhage segmentation dataset publicly available. In addition, we propose a multi-scale attention subtraction network (MASNet) for UWF retinal hemorrhage segmentation. Specifically, highly focused lesion features are extracted by using the proposed multi-scale attention subtraction (MAS) module at the progress of the skip-connection. Several comparative experiments and ablation experiments were performed at the UWF-RHS Dataset, and all experiments state that our proposed method is effective in diagnosing retinal hemorrhages with state-of-the-art results. The proposed UWF-RHS dataset and MASNet will greatly facilitate the development of automated segmentation techniques for UWF retinal hemorrhages. Links to the UWF-RHS dataset and the MASNet model code are available from https://github.com/wurenkai/UWF-RHS-Dataset-and-MASNet .
Computer-aided diagnosis has been slow to develop in the field of oral ulcers. One of the major reasons for this is the lack of publicly available datasets. However, oral ulcers have cancerous lesions and their mortality rate is high. The ability to recognize oral ulcers at an early stage in a timely and effective manner is a very critical issue. In recent years, although there exists a small group of researchers working on these, the datasets are private. Therefore to address this challenge, in this paper a multi-tasking oral ulcer dataset (Autooral) containing two major tasks of lesion segmentation and classification is proposed and made publicly available. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first team to make publicly available an oral ulcer dataset with multi-tasking. In addition, we propose a novel modeling framework, HF-UNet, for segmenting oral ulcer lesion regions. Specifically, the proposed high-order focus interaction module (HFblock) performs acquisition of global properties and focus for acquisition of local properties through high-order attention. The proposed lesion localization module (LL-M) employs a novel hybrid sobel filter, which improves the recognition of ulcer edges. Experimental results on the proposed Autooral dataset show that our proposed HF-UNet segmentation of oral ulcers achieves a DSC value of about 0.80 and the inference memory occupies only 2029 MB. The proposed method guarantees a low running load while maintaining a high-performance segmentation capability. The proposed Autooral dataset and code are available from https://github.com/wurenkai/HF-UNet-and-Autooral-dataset.