Discriminative Feature Network Based on a Hierarchical Attention Mechanism for Semantic Hippocampus Segmentation

The morphological analysis of hippocampus is vital to various neurological studies including brain disorders and brain anatomy. To assist doctors in analyzing the shape and volume of the hippocampus, an accurate and automatic hippocampus segmentation method is highly demanded in the clinical practice. Given that fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have made significant contributions in biomedical image segmentation applications, we propose a notably discriminative feature network based on a hierarchical attention mechanism in hippocampal segmentation. First, considering the problem that the hippocampus is a rather small part in MR images, we design a context-aware high-level feature extraction module (CHFEM) to extract high-level features of scale invariance in the encoder stage. Further, we introduce a hierarchical attention mechanism into our segmentation framework. The mechanism is divided into three parts: a low-level feature spatial attention module (LFSAM) is developed to learn the spatial relationship between different pixels on each channel in the low-level stage of the encoder, a high-level feature channel attention module (HFCAM) is to model the semantic information relationship on different channel images in the high-level stage of the encoder, and a cross-connected attention module (CCAM) is designed in the decoder part to further suppress the noisy boundaries of hippocampus and simultaneously utilize the attentional low-level features from the encoder to better guide the high-level hippocampus edge segmentation in the decoder phase. The proposed approach achieves outstanding performance on the ADNI dataset and the Decathlon dataset compared with other semantic segmentation models and existing hippocampal segmentation approaches. Source code is available at https://github.com/LannyShi/Hippocampal-segmentation.