DCATNet: polyp segmentation with deformable convolution and contextual-aware attention network

Polyp segmentation is crucial in computer-aided diagnosis but remains challenging due to the complexity of medical images and anatomical variations. Current state-of-the-art methods struggle with accurate polyp segmentation due to the variability in size, shape, and texture. These factors make boundary detection challenging, often resulting in incomplete or inaccurate segmentation. To address these challenges, we propose DCATNet, a novel deep learning architecture specifically designed for polyp segmentation. DCATNet is a U-shaped network that combines ResNetV2-50 as an encoder for capturing local features and a Transformer for modeling long-range dependencies. It integrates three key components: the Geometry Attention Module (GAM), the Contextual Attention Gate (CAG), and the Multi-scale Feature Extraction (MSFE) block. We evaluated DCATNet on five public datasets. On Kvasir-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB, the model achieved mean dice scores of 0.9351 and 0.9444, respectively, outperforming previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Cross-validation further demonstrated its superior generalization capability. Ablation studies confirmed the effectiveness of each component in DCATNet. Integrating GAM, CAG, and MSFE effectively improves feature representation and fusion, leading to precise and reliable segmentation results. These findings underscore DCATNet's potential for clinical application and can be used for a wide range of medical image segmentation tasks.