Ultra-Lightweight Network for Medical Image Segmentation Inspired by Bio-Visual Interaction

Computer-aided medical image segmentation helps to assist physicians in locating lesion area for the subsequent diagnosis and treatment. Due to the irregular shape of the target and the uneven sample size between the target and the background area, automatic segmentation of medical images is a challenging task. Many CNN-Based, Transformer-Based models deepen the number of network layers or introduce complex modules in order to improve the segmentation accuracy. Limited by the computational resources, these types of large models are not suitable for the actual clinical environment. Inspired by the rapidity, accuracy, and low consumption characteristics of bio-visual processing, the Ultra-Lightweight Network Inspired by Bio-Visual Interaction (BVI-Net) is constructed in this paper. The Global Pathway is constructed by simulating the dorsal stream, in order to extract global features rapidly, and the Local Pathway is constructed by simulating the ventral stream, in order to process local features finely. At the same time, the skip connection module integrating Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) attention mechanism is constructed to simulate the synchronous integration ability of the visual pathway for multi-level features. The International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) dataset, the Liver Tumor Segmentation (LiTS) dataset, and the Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) dataset are used for experiments. The BVI-Net proposed in this paper requires only 0.026M parameters to achieve the excellent performance in three representative medical image segmentation datasets, which has certain advantages over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The biological vision mechanism and the artificial intelligence algorithm are integrated in this paper, which provides new ideas for the construction of biological vision-guided deep learning models and promotes the development of biomimetic computational vision.