A Subabdominal MRI Image Segmentation Algorithm Based on Multi-Scale Feature Pyramid Network and Dual Attention Mechanism

This study aimed to solve the semantic gap and misalignment issue between encoding and decoding because of multiple convolutional and pooling operations in U-Net when segmenting subabdominal MRI images during rectal cancer treatment. A MRI Image Segmentation is proposed based on a multi-scale feature pyramid network and dual attention mechanism. Our innovation is the design of two modules: 1) a dilated convolution and multi-scale feature pyramid network are used in the encoding to avoid the semantic gap. 2) a dual attention mechanism is designed to maintain spatial information of U-Net and reduce misalignment. Experiments on a subabdominal MRI image dataset show the proposed method achieves better performance than others methods. In conclusion, a multi-scale feature pyramid network can reduce the semantic gap, and the dual attention mechanism can make an alignment of features between encoding and decoding.