CoRe: An End-to-End Collaborative Refinement Network for Medical Image Segmentation

The anatomical information obtained from medical image segmentation will provide a crucial decision-making basis for clinical diagnosis and treatment. Deep networks with encoder-decoder architecture proposed recently have achieved impressive results. However, these existing deep networks have some inherent flaws, e.g., network depth and downsampling operators jointly determine the loss of spatial detail information of deep features. We find that it is the lack of targeted solutions to these inherent flaws that make it difficult to further improve the segmentation performance. Therefore, based on these findings, we propose an end-to-end collaborative refinement method (CoRe). Specifically, we first design to generate an Error-Prone Region (EPR) by predicting uncertainty map and foreground boundary map to simulate the error region, and after locating pixels with high error proneness, we propose a feature refinement module (FRM) based on neighborhood-aware features and foreground-boundary-enhanced features to refine the upsampling features of the decoder, so as to better reconstruct the lost spatial detail information. In addition, a segmentation refinement module (SRM) is proposed to refine coarse segmentation prediction by establishing highly representative global class centers that comprehensively contain the intrinsic properties of each segmentation target. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on five datasets with different modalities and segmentation targets. The results show that our method achieves significant improvements and competes favorably with current state-of-the-art methods.