Image segmentation network for laparoscopic surgery

Surgical image segmentation serves as the foundation for laparoscopic surgical navigation technology. The indistinct local features of biological tissues in laparoscopic image pose challenges for image segmentation. To address this issue, we develop an image segmentation network tailored for laparoscopic surgery. Firstly, we introduce the Mixed Attention Enhancement (MAE) module that sequentially conducts the Channel Attention Enhancement (CAE) module and the Global Feature Enhancement (GFE) module linked in series. The CAE module enhances the network’s perception of prominent channels, allowing feature maps to exhibit clear local features. The GFE module is capable of extracting global features from both the height and width dimensions of images and integrating them into three-dimensional features. This enhancement improves the network’s ability to capture global features, thereby facilitating the inference of regions with indistinct local features. Secondly, we propose the Multi-scale Feature Fusion (MFF) module. This module expands the feature map into various scales, further enlarging the network’s receptive field and enhancing perception of features at multiple scales. In addition, we tested the proposed network on the EndoVis 2018 and a human minimally invasive liver resection image segmentation dataset, comparing it against six other advanced image segmentation networks. The comparative test results demonstrate that the proposed network achieves the most advanced performance on both datasets, proving its potential in improving surgical image segmentation outcome. The codes of MAMNet are available at: https://github.com/Pang1234567/MAMNet.