GCtx-UNet: Efficient Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is crucial for disease diagnosis and monitoring. Though effective, the current segmentation networks such as UNet struggle with capturing long-range features. More accurate models such as TransUNet, Swin-UNet, and CS-UNet have higher computation complexity. To address this problem, we propose GCtx-UNet, a lightweight segmentation architecture that can capture global and local image features with accuracy better or comparable to the state-of-the-art approaches. GCtx-UNet uses vision transformer that leverages global context self-attention modules joined with local self-attention to model long and short range spatial dependencies. GCtx-UNet is evaluated on the Synapse multi-organ abdominal CT dataset, the ACDC cardiac MRI dataset, and several polyp segmentation datasets. In terms of Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Hausdorff Distance (HD) metrics, GCtx-UNet outperformed CNN-based and Transformer-based approaches, with notable gains in the segmentation of complex and small anatomical structures. Moreover, GCtx-UNet is much more efficient than the state-of-the-art approaches with smaller model size, lower computation workload, and faster training and inference speed, making it a practical choice for clinical applications.

Transfer Learning for Microstructure Segmentation with CS-UNet: A Hybrid Algorithm with Transformer and CNN Encoders

Transfer learning improves the performance of deep learning models by initializing them with parameters pre-trained on larger datasets. Intuitively, transfer learning is more effective when pre-training is on the in-domain datasets. A recent study by NASA has demonstrated that the microstructure segmentation with encoder-decoder algorithms benefits more from CNN encoders pre-trained on microscopy images than from those pre-trained on natural images. However, CNN models only capture the local spatial relations in images. In recent years, attention networks such as Transformers are increasingly used in image analysis to capture the long-range relations between pixels. In this study, we compare the segmentation performance of Transformer and CNN models pre-trained on microscopy images with those pre-trained on natural images. Our result partially confirms the NASA study that the segmentation performance of out-of-distribution images (taken under different imaging and sample conditions) is significantly improved when pre-training on microscopy images. However, the performance gain for one-shot and few-shot learning is more modest with Transformers. We also find that for image segmentation, the combination of pre-trained Transformers and CNN encoders are consistently better than pre-trained CNN encoders alone. Our dataset (of about 50,000 images) combines the public portion of the NASA dataset with additional images we collected. Even with much less training data, our pre-trained models have significantly better performance for image segmentation. This result suggests that Transformers and CNN complement each other and when pre-trained on microscopy images, they are more beneficial to the downstream tasks.

Computer Vision Methods for the Microstructural Analysis of Materials: The State-of-the-art and Future Perspectives

Finding quantitative descriptors representing the microstructural features of a given material is an ongoing research area in the paradigm of Materials-by-Design. Historically, microstructural analysis mostly relies on qualitative descriptions. However, to build a robust and accurate process-structure-properties relationship, which is required for designing new advanced high-performance materials, the extraction of quantitative and meaningful statistical data from the microstructural analysis is a critical step. In recent years, computer vision (CV) methods, especially those which are centered around convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms have shown promising results for this purpose. This review paper focuses on the state-of-the-art CNN-based techniques that have been applied to various multi-scale microstructural image analysis tasks, including classification, object detection, segmentation, feature extraction, and reconstruction. Additionally, we identified the main challenges with regard to the application of these methods to materials science research. Finally, we discussed some possible future directions of research in this area. In particular, we emphasized the application of transformer-based models and their capabilities to improve the microstructural analysis of materials.