PolySegNet: improving polyp segmentation through swin transformer and vision transformer fusion

Colorectal cancer ranks as the second most prevalent cancer worldwide, with a high mortality rate. Colonoscopy stands as the preferred procedure for diagnosing colorectal cancer. Detecting polyps at an early stage is critical for effective prevention and diagnosis. However, challenges in colonoscopic procedures often lead medical practitioners to seek support from alternative techniques for timely polyp identification. Polyp segmentation emerges as a promising approach to identify polyps in colonoscopy images. In this paper, we propose an advanced method, PolySegNet, that leverages both Vision Transformer and Swin Transformer, coupled with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) decoder. The fusion of these models facilitates a comprehensive analysis of various modules in our proposed architecture.To assess the performance of PolySegNet, we evaluate it on three colonoscopy datasets, a combined dataset, and their augmented versions. The experimental results demonstrate that PolySegNet achieves competitive results in terms of polyp segmentation accuracy and efficacy, achieving a mean Dice score of 0.92 and a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.86. These metrics highlight the superior performance of PolySegNet in accurately delineating polyp boundaries compared to existing methods. PolySegNet has shown great promise in accurately and efficiently segmenting polyps in medical images. The proposed method could be the foundation for a new class of transformer-based segmentation models in medical image analysis.