DAC-UNet: Dual Attention CNN-Enhanced CswinUnet for Gastric Cancer Pathological Image Segmentation

Gastric cancer is one of the most lethal cancers. Currently, clinical diagnosis primarily relies on gastroscopic biopsies and the manual experience of doctors to assess the development of lesions in tissue sections. However, pathological screening requires a significant amount of time from specialized pathologists. Due to variations in clinical experience and limitations in medical resources, the detection of gastric cancer still faces challenges. Traditional methods for segmenting gastric cancer images often overlook the hierarchical structure of features and the spatial details, both local and global, in the lesion images. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a hybrid and efficient pathological image segmentation network named DAC-UNet, designed for precise pathological image segmentation tasks. DAC-UNet uses Cswin Transformer blocks to build a hierarchical structure, allowing it to capture global information with less computational complexity. The network also includes multi-scale dual attention skip connections between the encoder and decoder to preserve local spatial details and improve global interactions across different scales. We conducted a thorough theoretical analysis of this method and validated it on a gastric slice dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves outstanding performance on both our gastric slice dataset and the MoNuSeg dataset. Specifically, on our gastric slice dataset, we obtained a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 89.42% and an HD95 of 47.24, while on the MoNuSeg dataset, we achieved a DSC of 79.28% and a 95th percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95) of 19.38.