A Survey on Deep Learning for Polyp Segmentation: Techniques, Challenges and Future Trends

Early detection and assessment of polyps play a crucial role in the prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC). Polyp segmentation provides an effective solution to assist clinicians in accurately locating and segmenting polyp regions. In the past, people often relied on manually extracted lower-level features such as color, texture, and shape, which often had issues capturing global context and lacked robustness to complex scenarios. With the advent of deep learning, more and more outstanding medical image segmentation algorithms based on deep learning networks have emerged, making significant progress in this field. This paper provides a comprehensive review of polyp segmentation algorithms. We first review some traditional algorithms based on manually extracted features and deep segmentation algorithms, then detail benchmark datasets related to the topic. Specifically, we carry out a comprehensive evaluation of recent deep learning models and results based on polyp sizes, considering the pain points of research topics and differences in network structures. Finally, we discuss the challenges of polyp segmentation and future trends in this field. The models, benchmark datasets, and source code links we collected are all published at https://github.com/taozh2017/Awesome-Polyp-Segmentation.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Edge-aware Feature Aggregation Network for Polyp Segmentation

Precise polyp segmentation is vital for the early diagnosis and prevention of colorectal cancer (CRC) in clinical practice. However, due to scale variation and blurry polyp boundaries, it is still a challenging task to achieve satisfactory segmentation performance with different scales and shapes. In this study, we present a novel Edge-aware Feature Aggregation Network (EFA-Net) for polyp segmentation, which can fully make use of cross-level and multi-scale features to enhance the performance of polyp segmentation. Specifically, we first present an Edge-aware Guidance Module (EGM) to combine the low-level features with the high-level features to learn an edge-enhanced feature, which is incorporated into each decoder unit using a layer-by-layer strategy. Besides, a Scale-aware Convolution Module (SCM) is proposed to learn scale-aware features by using dilated convolutions with different ratios, in order to effectively deal with scale variation. Further, a Cross-level Fusion Module (CFM) is proposed to effectively integrate the cross-level features, which can exploit the local and global contextual information. Finally, the outputs of CFMs are adaptively weighted by using the learned edge-aware feature, which are then used to produce multiple side-out segmentation maps. Experimental results on five widely adopted colonoscopy datasets show that our EFA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art polyp segmentation methods in terms of generalization and effectiveness.Comment: 20 pages 8 figure

PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation

Colonoscopy is an effective technique for detecting colorectal polyps, which are highly related to colorectal cancer. In clinical practice, segmenting polyps from colonoscopy images is of great importance since it provides valuable information for diagnosis and surgery. However, accurate polyp segmentation is a challenging task, for two major reasons: (i) the same type of polyps has a diversity of size, color and texture; and (ii) the boundary between a polyp and its surrounding mucosa is not sharp. To address these challenges, we propose a parallel reverse attention network (PraNet) for accurate polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images. Specifically, we first aggregate the features in high-level layers using a parallel partial decoder (PPD). Based on the combined feature, we then generate a global map as the initial guidance area for the following components. In addition, we mine the boundary cues using a reverse attention (RA) module, which is able to establish the relationship between areas and boundary cues. Thanks to the recurrent cooperation mechanism between areas and boundaries, our PraNet is capable of calibrating any misaligned predictions, improving the segmentation accuracy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on five challenging datasets across six metrics show that our PraNet improves the segmentation accuracy significantly, and presents a number of advantages in terms of generalizability, and real-time segmentation efficiency.Comment: Accepted to MICCAI 202

LAPFormer: A Light and Accurate Polyp Segmentation Transformer

Polyp segmentation is still known as a difficult problem due to the large variety of polyp shapes, scanning and labeling modalities. This prevents deep learning model to generalize well on unseen data. However, Transformer-based approach recently has achieved some remarkable results on performance with the ability of extracting global context better than CNN-based architecture and yet lead to better generalization. To leverage this strength of Transformer, we propose a new model with encoder-decoder architecture named LAPFormer, which uses a hierarchical Transformer encoder to better extract global feature and combine with our novel CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) decoder for capturing local appearance of the polyps. Our proposed decoder contains a progressive feature fusion module designed for fusing feature from upper scales and lower scales and enable multi-scale features to be more correlative. Besides, we also use feature refinement module and feature selection module for processing feature. We test our model on five popular benchmark datasets for polyp segmentation, including Kvasir, CVC-Clinic DB, CVC-ColonDB, CVC-T, and ETIS-LaribComment: 7 pages, 7 figures, ACL 2023 underrevie

Segment Anything Model-guided Collaborative Learning Network for Scribble-supervised Polyp Segmentation

Polyp segmentation plays a vital role in accurately locating polyps at an early stage, which holds significant clinical importance for the prevention of colorectal cancer. Various polyp segmentation methods have been developed using fully-supervised deep learning techniques. However, pixel-wise annotation for polyp images by physicians during the diagnosis is both time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, visual foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown remarkable performance. Nevertheless, directly applying SAM to medical segmentation may not produce satisfactory results due to the inherent absence of medical knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel SAM-guided Collaborative Learning Network (SAM-CLNet) for scribble-supervised polyp segmentation, enabling a collaborative learning process between our segmentation network and SAM to boost the model performance. Specifically, we first propose a Cross-level Enhancement and Aggregation Network (CEA-Net) for weakly-supervised polyp segmentation. Within CEA-Net, we propose a Cross-level Enhancement Module (CEM) that integrates the adjacent features to enhance the representation capabilities of different resolution features. Additionally, a Feature Aggregation Module (FAM) is employed to capture richer features across multiple levels. Moreover, we present a box-augmentation strategy that combines the segmentation maps generated by CEA-Net with scribble annotations to create more precise prompts. These prompts are then fed into SAM, generating segmentation SAM-guided masks, which can provide additional supervision to train CEA-Net effectively. Furthermore, we present an Image-level Filtering Mechanism to filter out unreliable SAM-guided masks. Extensive experimental results show that our SAM-CLNet outperforms state-of-the-art weakly-supervised segmentation methods.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Polyp-PVT: Polyp Segmentation with Pyramid Vision Transformers

Most polyp segmentation methods use CNNs as their backbone, leading to two key issues when exchanging information between the encoder and decoder: 1) taking into account the differences in contribution between different-level features; and 2) designing an effective mechanism for fusing these features. Different from existing CNN-based methods, we adopt a transformer encoder, which learns more powerful and robust representations. In addition, considering the image acquisition influence and elusive properties of polyps, we introduce three novel modules, including a cascaded fusion module (CFM), a camouflage identification module (CIM), and a similarity aggregation module (SAM). Among these, the CFM is used to collect the semantic and location information of polyps from high-level features, while the CIM is applied to capture polyp information disguised in low-level features. With the help of the SAM, we extend the pixel features of the polyp area with high-level semantic position information to the entire polyp area, thereby effectively fusing cross-level features. The proposed model, named Polyp-PVT, effectively suppresses noises in the features and significantly improves their expressive capabilities. Extensive experiments on five widely adopted datasets show that the proposed model is more robust to various challenging situations (e.g., appearance changes, small objects) than existing methods, and achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. The proposed model is available at https://github.com/DengPingFan/Polyp-PVT.Comment: Technical Repor

Multi-level feature fusion network combining attention mechanisms for polyp segmentation

Clinically, automated polyp segmentation techniques have the potential to significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of medical diagnosis, thereby reducing the risk of colorectal cancer in patients. Unfortunately, existing methods suffer from two significant weaknesses that can impact the accuracy of segmentation. Firstly, features extracted by encoders are not adequately filtered and utilized. Secondly, semantic conflicts and information redundancy caused by feature fusion are not attended to. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach for polyp segmentation, named MLFF-Net, which leverages multi-level feature fusion and attention mechanisms. Specifically, MLFF-Net comprises three modules: Multi-scale Attention Module (MAM), High-level Feature Enhancement Module (HFEM), and Global Attention Module (GAM). Among these, MAM is used to extract multi-scale information and polyp details from the shallow output of the encoder. In HFEM, the deep features of the encoders complement each other by aggregation. Meanwhile, the attention mechanism redistributes the weight of the aggregated features, weakening the conflicting redundant parts and highlighting the information useful to the task. GAM combines features from the encoder and decoder features, as well as computes global dependencies to prevent receptive field locality. Experimental results on five public datasets show that the proposed method not only can segment multiple types of polyps but also has advantages over current state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and generalization ability

RaBiT: An Efficient Transformer using Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network with Reverse Attention for Colon Polyp Segmentation

Automatic and accurate segmentation of colon polyps is essential for early diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Advanced deep learning models have shown promising results in polyp segmentation. However, they still have limitations in representing multi-scale features and generalization capability. To address these issues, this paper introduces RaBiT, an encoder-decoder model that incorporates a lightweight Transformer-based architecture in the encoder to model multiple-level global semantic relationships. The decoder consists of several bidirectional feature pyramid layers with reverse attention modules to better fuse feature maps at various levels and incrementally refine polyp boundaries. We also propose ideas to lighten the reverse attention module and make it more suitable for multi-class segmentation. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing methods across all datasets while maintaining low computational complexity. Moreover, our method demonstrates high generalization capability in cross-dataset experiments, even when the training and test sets have different characteristics

Neural Network Pruning for Real-time Polyp Segmentation

Computer-assisted treatment has emerged as a viable application of medical imaging, owing to the efficacy of deep learning models. Real-time inference speed remains a key requirement for such applications to help medical personnel. Even though there generally exists a trade-off between performance and model size, impressive efforts have been made to retain near-original performance by compromising model size. Neural network pruning has emerged as an exciting area that aims to eliminate redundant parameters to make the inference faster. In this study, we show an application of neural network pruning in polyp segmentation. We compute the importance score of convolutional filters and remove the filters having the least scores, which to some value of pruning does not degrade the performance. For computing the importance score, we use the Taylor First Order (TaylorFO) approximation of the change in network output for the removal of certain filters. Specifically, we employ a gradient-normalized backpropagation for the computation of the importance score. Through experiments in the polyp datasets, we validate that our approach can significantly reduce the parameter count and FLOPs retaining similar performance