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BLE-Net: boundary learning and enhancement network for polyp segmentation

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Abstract

Automatic polyp segmentation can improve the accuracy of colonoscopy and plays a crucial role in colorectal cancer prevention. However, existing U-shaped convolutional neural networks fail to satisfactorily localize the boundaries for polyp region, which inevitably degenerates the performance of polyp segmentation. In this article, we propose a boundary learning and enhancement network (BLE-Net) that finely restores edge localization by combining two novel boundary modules. Specifically, a novel boundary learning (BL) module is deployed on the encoder stage to embed edge details into high-level features via a bottom-up fusion way, thereby producing discriminative features with both semantics and boundary information. Moreover, to strengthen the weak responses at fuzzy boundaries, we further design a boundary enhancement (BE) module, in which three cascaded boundary-aware attention blocks progressively endow ambiguous edge cues and rectify preceding maps in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Extensive experimental results on five polyp datasets demonstrate that BLE-Net has excellent segmentation performance and generalization capability, outperforming the state-of-the-arts.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018 YFB0804202, 2018YFB0804203), the Regional Joint Fund of NSFC (U19A2057), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61876070), the Jilin Province Science and Technology Development Plan Project (20190303134SF), the Science and Technology Planning Project of Inner Mongolia (2020GG0130), the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia (2020MS04007), and the Ph.D. Foundation of Hulunbuir University (2020BS11).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Na Ta & Haipeng Chen

  2. College of Computer, Hulunbuir University, Hulunbuir, 021008, China

    Na Ta

  3. Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Na Ta & Haipeng Chen

  4. Public Computer Education and Research Center, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yingda Lyu

  5. School of Physics and Electronic Information, Hulunbuir University, Hulunbuir, 021008, China

    Taosuo Wu

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Correspondence to Yingda Lyu.

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Ta, N., Chen, H., Lyu, Y. et al. BLE-Net: boundary learning and enhancement network for polyp segmentation. Multimedia Systems 29, 3041–3054 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-022-00900-2

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