Introducing frequency representation into convolution neural networks for medical image segmentation via twin-Kernel Fourier convolution

For medical image segmentation, deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, the powerful spectral representation in the field of image processing is rarely considered in these models.

In this work, we propose to introduce frequency representation into convolution neural networks (CNNs) and design a novel model, tKFC-Net, to combine powerful feature representation in both frequency and spatial domains. Through the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operation, frequency representation is employed on pooling, upsampling, and convolution without any adjustments to the network architecture. Furthermore, we replace original convolution with twin-Kernel Fourier Convolution (t-KFC), a new designed convolution layer, to specify the convolution kernels for particular functions and extract features from different frequency components.

We experimentally show that our method has an edge over other models in the task of medical image segmentation. Evaluated on four datasets-skin lesion segmentation (ISIC 2018), retinal blood vessel segmentation (DRIVE), lung segmentation (COVID-19-CT-Seg), and brain tumor segmentation (BraTS 2019), the proposed model achieves outstanding results: the metric F1-Score is 0.878 for ISIC 2018, 0.8185 for DRIVE, 0.9830 for COVID-19-CT-Seg, and 0.8457 for BraTS 2019.

The introduction of spectral representation retains spectral features which result in more accurate segmentation. The proposed method is orthogonal to other topology improvement methods and very convenient to be combined.