DA-TransResUNet: Residual U-Net Liver Segmentation Model Integrating Dual Attention of Spatial and Channel with Transformer

Precise medical image segmentation plays a vital role in disease diagnosis and clinical treatment. Although U-Net-based architectures and their Transformer-enhanced variants have achieved remarkable progress in automatic segmentation tasks, they still face challenges in complex medical imaging scenarios, particularly around simultaneously modeling fine-grained local details and capturing long-range global contextual information, which limits segmentation accuracy and structural consistency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel medical image segmentation framework termed DA-TransResUNet. Built upon a ResUNet backbone, the proposed network integrates residual learning, Transformer-based encoding, and a dual-attention (DA) mechanism in a unified manner. Residual blocks facilitate stable optimization and progressive feature refinement in deep networks, while the Transformer module effectively models long-range dependencies to enhance global context representation. Meanwhile, the proposed DA-Block jointly exploits local and global features as well as spatial and channel-wise dependencies, leading to more discriminative feature representations. Furthermore, embedding DA-Blocks into both the feature embedding stage and skip connections strengthens information interaction between the encoder and decoder, thereby improving overall segmentation performance. Experimental results on the LiTS2017 dataset and Sliver07 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves incremental improvement in liver segmentation. In particular, on the LiTS2017 dataset, DA-TransResUNet achieves a Dice score of 97.39%, a VOE of 5.08%, and an RVD of −0.74%, validating its effectiveness for liver segmentation.