DPUSegDiff: A Dual-Path U-Net Segmentation Diffusion model for medical image segmentation

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) have had remarkable success in image generation. Inspired by this, recent medical image segmentation tasks have started to use diffusion-based methods. These methods leverage iterations and sampling to generate smoother and more representative implicit integration. However, current diffusion-based segmentation models mainly rely on traditional neural networks and seldom focus on effectively interacting semantic and noise information. Moreover, they usually use a single network architecture instead of a hybrid one combining CNN and Transformer. To address limitations, we propose a dual-path U-Net segmentation diffusion (DPUSegDiff) model. It comprises two U-shaped networks based on the edge augmented local encoder (EALE) and the mixed transformer global encoder (MTGE). EALE uses the Sobel operator for local feature extraction, and MTGE has a cross-attention mechanism to facilitate information interaction. To integrate information from both paths selectively and adaptively, we design a bilateral gated transformer module (BGTM) to combine deep semantic information effectively. Experiments on three segmentation tasks—skin lesions, polyps, and brain tumors—show that the proposed DPUSegDiff outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in segmentation performance and generalization ability. The code has been released on GitHub (https://github.com/Fanyyz/DPUSegDiff).