Dual Attention and Channel Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling Half-UNet for Polyp Segmentation
Abstract
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths, with two million cases detected in 2020 and causing one million deaths annually. Approximately 95% of CRC cases originate from colorectal adenomatous polyps. Early detection through accurate polyp segmentation is crucial for preventing and treating CRC effectively. While colonoscopy screening remains the primary detection method, its limitations have prompted the development of Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems enhanced by deep learning models. This study proposes a novel neural network architecture called Dual Attention and Channel Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling Half-UNet (DACHalf-UNet) for medical polyp image segmentation that balances optimal performance with computational efficiency. The proposed model builds upon the U-Net framework by integrating Double Squeeze-and-Excitation (DSE) blocks in the encoder after the Ghost Module, Channel Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (CASPP) in the bottleneck and decoder, and Attention Gate (AG) mechanisms within the architecture. DACHalf-UNet was trained and evaluated on the CVC-ClinicDB and Kvasir-SEG datasets for 70 epochs. Evaluations demonstrated superior performance with F1-Score and IoU values of 94.23% and 89.28% on CVC-ClinicDB, and 88.40% and 81.47% on Kvasir-SEG, respectively. Comparative analysis showed that DACHalf-UNet outperforms existing architectures including U-Net, U-Net++, ResU-Net, AGU-Net, CSAP-UNet, PRCNet, UNeXt, and UNeSt. Notably, the model achieves this performance with only 0.56 million trainable parameters and 30.29 GFLOPs, significantly reducing computational complexity compared to previous methods. These results demonstrate that DACHalf-UNet effectively addresses the need for accurate and efficient polyp segmentation, potentially enhancing CAD systems and contributing to improved CRC detection and treatment outcomes.
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