Semantic Segmentation of Digestive Abnormalities from WCE Images by Using AttResU-Net Architecture

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common malignancies and the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Wireless capsule endoscopy is currently the most frequent method for detecting precancerous digestive diseases. Thus, precise and early polyps segmentation has significant clinical value in reducing the probability of cancer development. However, the manual examination is a time-consuming and tedious task for doctors. Therefore, scientists have proposed many computational techniques to automatically segment the anomalies from endoscopic images. In this paper, we present an end-to-end 2D attention residual U-Net architecture (AttResU-Net), which concurrently integrates the attention mechanism and residual units into U-Net for further polyp and bleeding segmentation performance enhancement. To reduce outside areas in an input image while emphasizing salient features, AttResU-Net inserts a sequence of attention units among related downsampling and upsampling steps. On the other hand, the residual block propagates information across layers, allowing for the construction of a deeper neural network capable of solving the vanishing gradient issue in each encoder. This improves the channel interdependencies while lowering the computational cost. Multiple publicly available datasets were employed in this work, to evaluate and verify the proposed method. Our highest-performing model was AttResU-Net, on the MICCAI 2017 WCE dataset, which achieved an accuracy of 99.16%, a Dice coefficient of 94.91%, and a Jaccard index of 90.32%. The experiment findings show that the proposed AttResU-Net overcomes its baselines and provides performance comparable to existing polyp segmentation approaches.