HMDA: A Hybrid Model with Multi-scale Deformable Attention for Medical Image Segmentation.

Abstract

Transformers have been applied to medical image segmentation tasks owing to their excellent longrange modeling capability, compensating for the failure of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to extract global features. However, the standardized self-attention modules in Transformers, characterized by a uniform and inflexible pattern of attention distribution, frequently lead to unnecessary computational redundancy with high-dimensional data, consequently impeding the model's capacity for precise concentration on salient image regions. Additionally, achieving effective explicit interaction between the spatially detailed features captured by CNNs and the long-range contextual features provided by Transformers remains challenging. In this architecture, we propose a Hybrid Transformer and CNN architecture with Multi-scale Deformable Attention(HMDA), designed to address the aforementioned issues effectively. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-scale Spatially Adaptive Deformable Attention (MSADA) mechanism, which attends to a small set of key sampling points around a reference within the multi-scale features, to achieve better performance. In addition, we propose the Cross Attention Bridge (CAB) module, which integrates multi-scale transformer and local features through channelwise cross attention enriching feature synthesis. HMDA is validated on multiple datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves competitive results compared to the previous methods.