MSINET: Multi-scale Interconnection Network for Medical Image Segmentation

In this work, an improved end-to-end U-Net structure, a hierarchical multi-scale interconnection network (HMINet), is proposed to make full use of the information contained in different feature maps in encoders and decoders to improve the accuracy of medical image segmentation. The network consists of two main components: a multi-scale fusion unit (MSF) and a multi-head feature enhancement unit (MFE). In the encoder part, the multi-scale fusion unit is used to fuse the information between the feature maps of different scales. By using convolution at different levels, a wider range of context information can be captured and fused into a more comprehensive representation of features. In the decoder part, multiple feature enhancement units can fully pay attention to the coordinates and channel information between feature maps, and then splice the encoded feature maps step by step to maximize the use of information from different feature maps. These feature maps are joined by a well-designed skip connection mechanism to retain more feature information and minimize information loss. The proposed method is tested on four public medical datasets and compared with other classical image segmentation models. The results show that HMINet can significantly improve the accuracy of medical image segmentation tasks and exceed the performance of other models in most cases.