CaraNet: Context Axial Reverse Attention Network for Segmentation of Small Medical Objects

Segmenting medical images accurately and reliably is important for disease diagnosis and treatment. It is a challenging task because of the wide variety of objects' sizes, shapes, and scanning modalities. Recently, many convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been designed for segmentation tasks and achieved great success. Few studies, however, have fully considered the sizes of objects and thus most demonstrate poor performance on segmentation of small objects segmentation. This can have significant impact on early detection of disease. This paper proposes a Context Axial Reserve Attention Network (CaraNet) to improve the segmentation performance on small objects compared with recent state-of-the-art models. We test our CaraNet on brain tumor (BraTS 2018) and polyp (Kvasir-SEG, CVC-ColonDB, CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-300 and ETIS-LaribPolypDB) segmentation. Our CaraNet not only achieves the top-rank mean Dice segmentation accuracy, but also shows a distinct advantage in segmentation of small medical objects.