P-TransUNet: an improved parallel network for medical image segmentation

Deep learning-based medical image segmentation has made great progress over the past decades. Scholars have proposed many novel transformer-based segmentation networks to solve the problems of building long-range dependencies and global context connections in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, these methods usually replace the CNN-based blocks with improved transformer-based structures, which leads to the lack of local feature extraction ability, and these structures require a huge number of data for training. Moreover, those methods did not pay attention to edge information, which is essential in medical image segmentation. To address these problems, we proposed a new network structure, called P-TransUNet. This network structure combines the designed efficient P-Transformer and the fusion module, which extract distance-related long-range dependencies and local information respectively and produce the fused features. Besides, we introduced edge loss into training to focus the attention of the network on the edge of the lesion area to improve segmentation performance. Extensive experiments across four tasks of medical image segmentation demonstrated the effectiveness of P-TransUNet, and showed that our network outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.