BCAU-Net: A Novel Architecture with Binary Channel Attention Module for MRI Brain Segmentation

Recently deep learning-based networks have achieved advanced performance in medical image segmentation. However, the development of deep learning is slow in magnetic resonance image (MRI) segmentation of normal brain tissues. In this paper, inspired by channel attention module, we propose a new architecture, Binary Channel Attention U-Net (BCAU- Net), by introducing a novel Binary Channel Attention Module (BCAM) into skip connection of U-Net, which can take full advantages of the channel information extracted from the encoding path and corresponding decoding path. To better aggregate multiscale spatial information of the feature map, spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) modules with different pooling operations are used in BCAM instead of original average-pooling and max-pooling operations. We verify this model on two datasets including IBSR and MRBrainS18, and obtain better performance on MRI brain segmentation compared with other methods. We believe the proposed method can advance the performance in brain segmentation and clinical diagnosis.