RetSeg: Retention-based Colorectal Polyps Segmentation Network

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have revolutionized medical imaging analysis, showcasing superior efficacy compared to conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in vital tasks such as polyp classification, detection, and segmentation. Leveraging attention mechanisms to focus on specific image regions, ViTs exhibit contextual awareness in processing visual data, culminating in robust and precise predictions, even for intricate medical images. Moreover, the inherent self-attention mechanism in Transformers accommodates varying input sizes and resolutions, granting an unprecedented flexibility absent in traditional CNNs. However, Transformers grapple with challenges like excessive memory usage and limited training parallelism due to self-attention, rendering them impractical for real-time disease detection on resource-constrained devices. In this study, we address these hurdles by investigating the integration of the recently introduced retention mechanism into polyp segmentation, introducing RetSeg, an encoder-decoder network featuring multi-head retention blocks. Drawing inspiration from Retentive Networks (RetNet), RetSeg is designed to bridge the gap between precise polyp segmentation and resource utilization, particularly tailored for colonoscopy images. We train and validate RetSeg for polyp segmentation employing two publicly available datasets: Kvasir-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB. Additionally, we showcase RetSeg's promising performance across diverse public datasets, including CVC-ColonDB, ETIS-LaribPolypDB, CVC-300, and BKAI-IGH NeoPolyp. While our work represents an early-stage exploration, further in-depth studies are imperative to advance these promising findings.