FocalTransNet: A Hybrid Focal-Enhanced Transformer Network for Medical Image Segmentation

CNNs have demonstrated superior performance in medical image segmentation. To overcome the limitation of only using local receptive field, previous work has attempted to integrate Transformers into convolutional network components such as encoders, decoders, or skip connections. However, these methods can only establish long-distance dependencies for some specific patterns and usually neglect the loss of fine-grained details during downsampling in multi-scale feature extraction. To address the issues, we present a novel hybrid Transformer network called FocalTransNet. Specifically, we construct a focal-enhanced (FE) Transformer module by introducing dense cross-connections into a CNN-Transformer dual-path structure and deploy the FE Transformer throughout the entire encoder. Different from existing hybrid networks that employ embedding or stacking strategies, the proposed model allows for a comprehensive extraction and deep fusion of both local and global features at different scales. Besides, we propose a symmetric patch merging (SPM) module for downsampling, which can retain the fine-grained details by establishing a specific information compensation mechanism. We evaluated the proposed method on four different medical image segmentation benchmarks. The proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art convolutional networks, Transformers, and hybrid networks. The code for FocalTransNet is publicly available at https://github.com/nemanjajoe/FocalTransNet.