TransGUNet: Transformer Meets Graph-based Skip Connection for Medical Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Nam, Ju-Hyeon, Syazwany, Nur Suriza, Lee, Sang-Chul
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Nam, Ju-Hyeon
Syazwany, Nur Suriza
Lee, Sang-Chul
author_facet Nam, Ju-Hyeon
Syazwany, Nur Suriza
Lee, Sang-Chul
contents Skip connection engineering is primarily employed to address the semantic gap between the encoder and decoder, while also integrating global dependencies to understand the relationships among complex anatomical structures in medical image segmentation. Although several models have proposed transformer-based approaches to incorporate global dependencies within skip connections, they often face limitations in capturing detailed local features with high computational complexity. In contrast, graph neural networks (GNNs) exploit graph structures to effectively capture local and global features. Leveraging these properties, we introduce an attentional cross-scale graph neural network (ACS-GNN), which enhances the skip connection framework by converting cross-scale feature maps into a graph structure and capturing complex anatomical structures through node attention. Additionally, we observed that deep learning models often produce uninformative feature maps, which degrades the quality of spatial attention maps. To address this problem, we integrated entropy-driven feature selection (EFS) with spatial attention, calculating an entropy score for each channel and filtering out high-entropy feature maps. Our innovative framework, TransGUNet, comprises ACS-GNN and EFS-based spatial attentio} to effectively enhance domain generalizability across various modalities by leveraging GNNs alongside a reliable spatial attention map, ensuring more robust features within the skip connection. Through comprehensive experiments and analysis, TransGUNet achieved superior segmentation performance on six seen and eight unseen datasets, demonstrating significantly higher efficiency compared to previous methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09931
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TransGUNet: Transformer Meets Graph-based Skip Connection for Medical Image Segmentation
Nam, Ju-Hyeon
Syazwany, Nur Suriza
Lee, Sang-Chul
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Skip connection engineering is primarily employed to address the semantic gap between the encoder and decoder, while also integrating global dependencies to understand the relationships among complex anatomical structures in medical image segmentation. Although several models have proposed transformer-based approaches to incorporate global dependencies within skip connections, they often face limitations in capturing detailed local features with high computational complexity. In contrast, graph neural networks (GNNs) exploit graph structures to effectively capture local and global features. Leveraging these properties, we introduce an attentional cross-scale graph neural network (ACS-GNN), which enhances the skip connection framework by converting cross-scale feature maps into a graph structure and capturing complex anatomical structures through node attention. Additionally, we observed that deep learning models often produce uninformative feature maps, which degrades the quality of spatial attention maps. To address this problem, we integrated entropy-driven feature selection (EFS) with spatial attention, calculating an entropy score for each channel and filtering out high-entropy feature maps. Our innovative framework, TransGUNet, comprises ACS-GNN and EFS-based spatial attentio} to effectively enhance domain generalizability across various modalities by leveraging GNNs alongside a reliable spatial attention map, ensuring more robust features within the skip connection. Through comprehensive experiments and analysis, TransGUNet achieved superior segmentation performance on six seen and eight unseen datasets, demonstrating significantly higher efficiency compared to previous methods.
title TransGUNet: Transformer Meets Graph-based Skip Connection for Medical Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09931