Hierarchical Attentional Feature Fusion for Surgical Instrument Segmentation

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2021 Nov:2021:3061-3065. doi: 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630553.

Abstract

Instrument segmentation is a crucial and challenging task for robot-assisted surgery operations. Recent commonly-used models extract feature maps in multiple scales and combine them via simple but inferior feature fusion strategies. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical attentional feature fusion scheme, which is efficient and compatible with encoder-decoder architectures. Specifically, to better combine feature maps between adjacent scales, we introduce dense pixel-wise relative attentions learned from the segmentation model; to resolve specific failure modes in predicted masks, we integrate the above attentional feature fusion strategy based on position-channel-aware parallel attention into the decoder. Extensive experimental results evaluated on three datasets from MICCAI 2017 EndoVis Challenge demonstrate that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art counterparts by a large margin.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Attention
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Learning
  • Robotic Surgical Procedures*
  • Surgical Instruments