DTASUnet: A local and global dual transformer with the attention
supervision U-network for brain tumor segmentation
Abstract
Glioma refers to a highly prevalent type of brain tumor that is strongly
associated with a high mortality rate. During the treatment process of
the disease, it is particularly important to accurately perform
segmentation of the glioma from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
However, existing methods used for glioma segmentation usually rely
solely on either local or global features and perform poorly in terms of
capturing and exploiting critical information from tumor volume
features. Herein, we propose a local and global dual transformer with an
attentional supervision U-shape network called DTASUnet, which is
purposed for glioma segmentation. First, we built a pyramid hierarchical
encoder based on 3D shift local and global transformers to effectively
extract the features and relationships of different tumor regions. We
also designed a 3D channel and spatial attention supervision module to
guide the network, allowing it to capture key information in volumetric
features more accurately during the training process. The experimental
results show that DTASUnet exhibited superior or competitive performance
compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms. In the BraTS 2018
validation set, the average Dice scores of DTASUnet for the tumor core
(TC), whole tumor (WT), and enhancing tumor (ET) regions were 0.845,
0.905, and 0.808, respectively. For the BraTS 2020 validation set, the
average Dice scores of TC, WT, and ET were 0.844, 0.906, and 0.790,
respectively. These results demonstrate that DTASUnet has utility in
assisting clinicians with determining the location of gliomas to
facilitate more efficient and accurate brain surgery and diagnosis.