DC-TransDPANet: A Transformer-Based Framework Integrating Composite Attention and Polarized Attention for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a critical task in image analysis and plays an essential role in computer-aided diagnosis. Despite the promising performance of hybrid models combining U-Net and transformer architectures, these approaches face challenges in extracting local features and optimizing attention mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose the Depthwise Composite Transformer and Depthwise Polarized Attention Network (DC-TransDPANet), a novel framework designed for medical image segmentation. The proposed DC-TransDPANet introduces a Depthwise Composite Attention Module (DW-CAM), which integrates depthwise convolution, and a Composite Attention mechanism to enhance local feature extraction and fuse contextual information. Additionally, a Depthwise Polarized Attention (DPA) block is employed to improve global context representation while preserving high-resolution details, achieving a fine balance between local and global feature extraction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DC-TransDPANet significantly outperforms existing methods in segmentation accuracy.