| Summary: | Cardiac magnetic resonance image (MRI) segmentation has the features such as there is a lot of noise, the target areas are indistinguishable from the background, and the shape of the right ventricle is irregular. Although convolution operations are good at extracting local features, the U-shaped convolutional neural networks (CNN) structure hardly models long-distance dependency between pixels and can not achieve ideal segmentation results on cardiac MRI. To solve these problems, UConvTrans is proposed with a dual-flow U-shaped network by global and local information integration. First, the network applies the CNN branch to extract local features and capture global representations by Transformer branch, which retains local detailed features and suppresses the interference of noise and background features in cardiac MRI. Next, the bidirectional fusion module is proposed to fuse the features extracted by CNN and the Transformer with each other, enhancing the feature expression capability and improving the segmentation accuracy of the right ventricle. Besides, the parameters of network can be set flexibly because the transformer structure in the proposed method does not require pre-trained weights. The proposed method also strikes a better balance between precision and efficiency, which is evaluated on the MICCAI 2017 ACDC dataset. The results show that the network outperforms U-Net by 1.13% average dice coefficient while the parameter amount and the floating point operations are only 10% and 8% of the U-Net. Finally, the proposed method achieves a dice coefficient of 92.42% for the right ventricle, 91.64% for the myocardium, and 95.06% for the left ventricle respectively and wins the first place in the myocardium and left ventricle on test set.
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