J-CaPA : Joint Channel and Pyramid Attention Improves Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Medical image segmentation is crucial for diagnosis and treatment planning. Traditional CNN-based models, like U-Net, have shown promising results but struggle to capture long-range dependencies and global context. To address these limitations, we propose a transformer-based architecture that jointly applies Channel Attention and Pyramid Attention mechanisms to improve multi-scale feature extraction and enhance segmentation performance for medical images. Increasing model complexity requires more training data, and we further improve model generalization with CutMix data augmentation. Our approach is evaluated on the Synapse multi-organ segmentation dataset, achieving a 6.9% improvement in Mean Dice score and a 39.9% improvement in Hausdorff Distance (HD95) over an implementation without our enhancements. Our proposed model demonstrates improved segmentation accuracy for complex anatomical structures, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.