Attention guided neural ODE network for breast tumor segmentation in medical images

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Ultrasound is a widely used screening tool for its portability and easy operation, and DCE-MRI can highlight the lesions more clearly and reveal the characteristics of tumors. They are both noninvasive and nonradiative for assessment of breast cancer. Doctors make diagnoses and further instructions through the sizes, shapes and textures of the breast masses showed on medical images, so automatic tumor segmentation via deep neural networks can to some extent assist doctors. Compared to some challenges which the popular deep neural networks have faced, such as large amounts of parameters, lack of interpretability, overfitting problem, etc., we propose a segmentation network named Att-U-Node which uses attention modules to guide a neural ODE-based framework, trying to alleviate the problems mentioned above. Specifically, the network uses ODE blocks to make up an encoder-decoder structure, feature modeling by neural ODE is completed at each level. Besides, we propose to use an attention module to calculate the coefficient and generate a much refined attention feature for skip connection. Three public available breast ultrasound image datasets (i.e. BUSI, BUS and OASBUD) and a private breast DCE-MRI dataset are used to assess the efficiency of the proposed model, besides, we upgrade the model to 3D for tumor segmentation with the data selected from Public QIN Breast DCE-MRI. The experiments show that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the related methods while mitigates the common problems of deep neural networks.

Keywords: Attention mechanism; Breast tumor segmentation; DCE-MRI; ODE; Ultrasound.