MCRformer: Morphological Constraint Reticular Transformer for 3D Medical
Image Segmentation
Abstract
Medical image segmentation is essential in medical image analysis since
it can provide reliable assistance in computer-aided clinical diagnosis,
treatment planning, and intervention. Although deep learning algorithms
based on CNNs and Transformers have made notable progress in medical
image segmentation, it is still challenging owing to the objects with
complex structures, low discrimination and differences between
individuals. To alleviate the problems, we propose a novel 3D medical
image segmentation network based on Transformers and CNNs combining
morphological information and reticular mechanism. Firstly, the
morphological constraint stream is designed to learn the prior shape
information based on the CNN model for enhancing the interpretability of
the ultimate trained model and accelerating the convergence. Secondly,
the Reticular Transformer is utilized to obtain multi-scale information
based on the Transformer, which can bind the local texture information
and underlying semantic information to further acquire the feature maps
with sufficient details and receptive field. The experiments demonstrate
that our proposed method outperforms many existing segmentation models
in terms of the performance in metrics DSC and HD
(80.46\% in DSC on the Synapse dataset and
90.83\% in DSC on the ACDC dataset). The code will be
released at https://github.com/rocklijun/MCRformer. Our proposed method
can not only achieve superior performance compared with most of the
current state-of-the-art methods, but also enhance the robustness and
interpretability of the model. Furthermore, the proposed morphological
constraint stream has the potential to be transferred to other
frameworks for different medical image analysis tasks.