Swin Deformable Attention Hybrid U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation

How to harmonize convolution and multi-head self-attention mechanisms has recently emerged as a significant area of research in the field of medical image segmentation. Various combination methods have been proposed. However, there is a common flaw in these works: failed to provide a direct explanation for their hybrid model, which is crucial in clinical scenarios. Deformable Attention can improve the segmentation performance and provide an explanation based on the deformation field. Incorporating Deformable Attention into a hybrid model could result in a synergistic effect to boost segmentation performance while enhancing the explainability. In this study, we propose the incorporation of Swin Deformable Attention with hybrid architecture to improve the segmentation performance while establishing explainability. In the experiment section, our proposed Swin Deformable Attention Hybrid UNet (SDAH-UNet) demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both anatomical and lesion segmentation tasks.