Quadratic polynomial guided fuzzy C-means and dual attention mechanism for medical image segmentation

Abstract Medical image segmentation is the most complex and important task in the field of medical image processing and analysis, as it is linked to disease diagnosis accuracy. However, due to the medical image's high complexity and noise, segmentation performance is limited. We propose a novel quadratic polynomial guided fuzzy C-means and dual attention mechanism composite network model architecture to address the aforementioned issues (QPFC-DA). It has mechanisms for channel and spatial edge attention, which guide the content and edge segmentation branches, respectively. The bi-directional long short-term memory network was added after the two content segmentation branches to better integrate multi-scale features and prevent the loss of important features. Furthermore, the fuzzy C-means algorithm guided by the quadratic polynomial can better distinguish the image's weak edge regions and has a degree of noise resistance, resulting in a membership matrix with less ambiguity and a more reliable segmentation result. We also conducted comparison and ablation experiments on three medical data sets. The experimental results show that this method is superior to several other well-known methods.