Attention 3D-CU-Net: Enhancing Kidney Tumor Segmentation Accuracy Through Selective Feature Emphasis

Kidney tumor segmentation from MR images became a pivotal research area in kidney cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. Accurate and efficient segmentation enables precise tumor localization, treatment planning, and monitoring of disease progression. Former studies have demonstrated the remarkable capability of the U-Net architecture in semantic segmentation of kidney tumors. A recent variant of the U-Net architecture, known as 3D-CU-Net, has been specifically designed with fully-connected dense skip connections to tackle the kidney tumor segmentation challenges related to network depth invariance, segmentation errors, and enforced feature fusion. While the 3D-CU-Net model demonstrated improved effectiveness in kidney tumor segmentation, it still exhibits significant limitations, including challenges in precise localization, fixed feature selection, image diversity, limited contextual information, and computational complexity. To address the limitations of the 3D-CU-Net model, this paper introduces the Attention 3D-CU-Net as a novel variant. The attention-based mechanism is seamlessly integrated with the 3D-CU-Net, prioritizing informative features to enhance segmentation accuracy by concentrating on selective regions. This innovative approach serves to significantly improve the model’s performance, particularly in challenging cases. The proposed model is evaluated on the TCGA-KIRC dataset, a widely used benchmark for kidney tumor segmentation. In comparative experiments, we evaluated the results using metrics like IoU, DSC and accuracy. Our Attention 3D-CU-Net model outperforms the baseline 3D-CU-Net and U-Net with notably higher scores: IoU (0.92), DSC (0.94), and accuracy (0.96).