Trilateral Attention Network for Real-time Medical Image Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of medical images into anatomically meaningful regions is critical for the extraction of quantitative indices or biomarkers. The common pipeline for segmentation comprises regions of interest detection stage and segmentation stage, which are independent of each other and typically performed using separate deep learning networks. The performance of the segmentation stage highly relies on the extracted set of spatial features and the receptive fields. In this work, we propose an end-to-end network, called Trilateral Attention Network (TaNet), for real-time detection and segmentation in medical images. TaNet has a module for region localization, and three segmentation pathways: 1) handcrafted pathway with hand-designed convolutional kernels, 2) detail pathway with regular convolutional kernels, and 3) a global pathway to enlarge the receptive field. The first two pathways encode rich handcrafted and low-level features extracted by hand-designed and regular kernels while the global pathway encodes high-level context information. By jointly training the network for localization and segmentation using different sets of features, TaNet achieved superior performance, in terms of accuracy and speed, when evaluated on an echocardiography dataset for cardiac segmentation. The code and models will be made publicly available in TaNet Github page.