CFII-Net: Explicit Class Embeddings and Feature Maps Through Iterative Interaction for Boosting Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Prior knowledge of category structure is essential in medical image segmentation, especially with significant organ structure differences. However, current hybrid architectures primarily focus on enhancing pixel-level representation learning, often neglecting or weakening the key prior knowledge of categorical structures, which poses challenges in capturing category relationships and accurate segmenting. To address this concern, we propose a novel network using Explicit Class Embeddings and Feature Maps through Iterative Interaction (CFII-Net) for boosting medical image segmentation. CFII-Net effectively segments images by exploring the relationship between explicit class embeddings and pixels in images. Specifically, we propose an Explicit Class Embedding Generator (ECEG) to obtain high-quality class semantic embeddings, incorporating category structure priors, which are used to guide high-accuracy segmentation. We then introduce an iterative Interactor, which utilizes transformers to facilitate the interaction between feature maps and class embeddings, thereby exploring pixel-to-class relationships. Furthermore, we propose updating strategies to refine the class embeddings and feature maps during the iteration process for achieving refined image segmentation. Extensive empirical evidence shows that any codec can be easily integrated into CFII-Net and yields improvements over the state-of-the-art methods in four public benchmarks.