Karimijafarbigloo, Sanaz and Azad, Reza and Kazerouni, Amirhossein and Merhof, Dorit (2025) MedScale-Former: Self-guided multiscale transformer for medical image segmentation. MEDICAL IMAGE ANALYSIS, 103: 103554. ISSN 1361-8415, 1361-8423
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
Accurate medical image segmentation is crucial for enabling automated clinical decision procedures. However, existing supervised deep learning methods for medical image segmentation face significant challenges due to their reliance on extensive labeled training data. To address this limitation, our novel approach introduces a dual-branch transformer network operating on two scales, strategically encoding global contextual dependencies while preserving local information. To promote self-supervised learning, our method leverages semantic dependencies between different scales, generating a supervisory signal for inter-scale consistency. Additionally, it incorporates a spatial stability loss within each scale, fostering self-supervised content clustering. While intra-scale and inter-scale consistency losses enhance feature uniformity within clusters, we introduce a cross-entropy loss function atop the clustering score map to effectively model cluster distributions and refine decision boundaries. Furthermore, to account for pixel-level similarities between organ or lesion subpixels, we propose a selective kernel regional attention module as a plug and play component. This module adeptly captures and outlines organ or lesion regions, slightly enhancing the definition of object boundaries. Our experimental results on skin lesion, lung organ, and multiple myeloma plasma cell segmentation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Transformer; Inter-scale; Intra-scale; Segmentation; Selective Kernel; Medical image |
| Subjects: | 000 Computer science, information & general works > 004 Computer science |
| Divisions: | Informatics and Data Science > Department Computational Life Science > Chair of Image Analysis and Computer Vision (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dorit Merhof) |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Jun 2026 07:53 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2026 07:53 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/66245 |
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