ERSegDiff: a diffusion-based model for edge reshaping in medical image segmentation

Phys Med Biol. 2024 Apr 18. doi: 10.1088/1361-6560/ad4080. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTMedical image segmentation is a crucial field of computer vision. Obtaining correct pathological areas can help clinicians analyze patient conditions more precisely. We have observed that both CNN-based and attention-based neural networks often produce rough segmentation results around the edges of the regions of interest. This significantly impacts the accuracy of obtaining the pathological areas. Without altering the original data and model architecture, further refining the initial segmentation outcomes can effectively address this issue and lead to more satisfactory results. Recently, diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding results in image generation, showcasing their powerful ability to model distributions. We believe that this ability can greatly enhance the accuracy of the reshaping results. This research proposes ERSegDiff, a neural network based on the diffusion model for reshaping segmentation borders. The diffusion model is trained to fit the distribution of the target edge area and is then used to modify the segmentation edge to produce more accurate segmentation results. By incorporating prior knowledge into the diffusion model, we can help it more accurately simulate the edge probability distribution of the samples. Moreover, we introduce the Edge Concern Module, which leverages attention mechanisms to produce feature weights and further refine the segmentation outco...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Source Type: research