AgileFormer: Spatially Agile Transformer UNet for Medical Image Segmentation
AgileFormer: Spatially Agile Transformer UNet for Medical Image Segmentation
Peijie Qiu Jin Yang Sayantan Kumar Soumyendu Sekhar Ghosh Aristeidis Sotiras

Abstract
In the past decades, deep neural networks, particularly convolutional neural networks, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of medical image segmentation tasks. Recently, the introduction of the vision transformer (ViT) has significantly altered the landscape of deep segmentation models. There has been a growing focus on ViTs, driven by their excellent performance and scalability. However, we argue that the current design of the vision transformer-based UNet (ViT-UNet) segmentation models may not effectively handle the heterogeneous appearance (e.g., varying shapes and sizes) of objects of interest in medical image segmentation tasks. To tackle this challenge, we present a structured approach to introduce spatially dynamic components to the ViT-UNet. This adaptation enables the model to effectively capture features of target objects with diverse appearances. This is achieved by three main components: \textbf{(i)} deformable patch embedding; \textbf{(ii)} spatially dynamic multi-head attention; \textbf{(iii)} deformable positional encoding. These components were integrated into a novel architecture, termed AgileFormer. AgileFormer is a spatially agile ViT-UNet designed for medical image segmentation. Experiments in three segmentation tasks using publicly available datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/sotiraslab/AgileFormer}{https://github.com/sotiraslab/AgileFormer}.
Code Repositories
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Methodology | Metrics |
|---|---|---|
| medical-image-segmentation-on-acdc | AgileFormer | Dice Score: 0.9255 |
| medical-image-segmentation-on-synapse-multi | AgileFormer | Avg DSC: 86.11 Avg HD: 12.88 |
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