Hybrid Attention Network for Accurate Breast Tumor Segmentation in Ultrasound Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Aslam, Muhammad Azeem, Naveed, Asim, Ahmed, Nisar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Aslam, Muhammad Azeem
Naveed, Asim
Ahmed, Nisar
author_facet Aslam, Muhammad Azeem
Naveed, Asim
Ahmed, Nisar
contents Breast ultrasound imaging is a valuable tool for early breast cancer detection, but automated tumor segmentation is challenging due to inherent noise, variations in scale of lesions, and fuzzy boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hybrid attention-based network for lesion segmentation. Our proposed architecture integrates a pre-trained DenseNet121 in the encoder part for robust feature extraction with a multi-branch attention-enhanced decoder tailored for breast ultrasound images. The bottleneck incorporates Global Spatial Attention (GSA), Position Encoding (PE), and Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA) to learn global context, spatial relationships, and relative positional features. The Spatial Feature Enhancement Block (SFEB) is embedded at skip connections to refine and enhance spatial features, enabling the network to focus more effectively on tumor regions. A hybrid loss function combining Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) and Jaccard Index loss optimizes both pixel-level accuracy and region-level overlap metrics, enhancing robustness to class imbalance and irregular tumor shapes. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, highlighting its potential to assist radiologists in early and accurate breast cancer diagnosis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_16592
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hybrid Attention Network for Accurate Breast Tumor Segmentation in Ultrasound Images
Aslam, Muhammad Azeem
Naveed, Asim
Ahmed, Nisar
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Breast ultrasound imaging is a valuable tool for early breast cancer detection, but automated tumor segmentation is challenging due to inherent noise, variations in scale of lesions, and fuzzy boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hybrid attention-based network for lesion segmentation. Our proposed architecture integrates a pre-trained DenseNet121 in the encoder part for robust feature extraction with a multi-branch attention-enhanced decoder tailored for breast ultrasound images. The bottleneck incorporates Global Spatial Attention (GSA), Position Encoding (PE), and Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA) to learn global context, spatial relationships, and relative positional features. The Spatial Feature Enhancement Block (SFEB) is embedded at skip connections to refine and enhance spatial features, enabling the network to focus more effectively on tumor regions. A hybrid loss function combining Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) and Jaccard Index loss optimizes both pixel-level accuracy and region-level overlap metrics, enhancing robustness to class imbalance and irregular tumor shapes. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, highlighting its potential to assist radiologists in early and accurate breast cancer diagnosis.
title Hybrid Attention Network for Accurate Breast Tumor Segmentation in Ultrasound Images
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16592