SEF-UNet: advancing abdominal multi-organ segmentation with SEFormer and depthwise cascaded upsampling

The abdomen houses multiple vital organs, which are associated with various diseases posing significant risks to human health. Early detection of abdominal organ conditions allows for timely intervention and treatment, preventing deterioration of patients’ health. Segmenting abdominal organs aids physicians in more accurately diagnosing organ lesions. However, the anatomical structures of abdominal organs are relatively complex, with organs overlapping each other, sharing similar features, thereby presenting challenges for segmentation tasks. In real medical scenarios, models must demonstrate real-time and low-latency features, necessitating an improvement in segmentation accuracy while minimizing the number of parameters. Researchers have developed various methods for abdominal organ segmentation, ranging from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to Transformers. However, these methods often encounter difficulties in accurately identifying organ segmentation boundaries. MetaFormer abstracts the framework of Transformers, excluding the multi-head Self-Attention, offering a new perspective for solving computer vision problems and overcoming the limitations of Vision Transformers and CNN backbone networks. To further enhance segmentation effectiveness, we propose a U-shaped network, integrating SEFormer and depthwise cascaded upsampling (dCUP) as the encoder and decoder, respectively, into the UNet structure, named SEF-UNet. SEFormer combines Squeeze-and-Excitation modules with depthwise separable convolutions, instantiating the MetaFormer framework, enhancing the capture of local details and texture information, thereby improving edge segmentation accuracy. dCUP further integrates shallow and deep information layers during the upsampling process. Our model significantly improves segmentation accuracy while reducing the parameter count and exhibits superior performance in segmenting organ edges that overlap each other, thereby offering potential deployment in real medical scenarios.