Effective and Efficient Medical Image Segmentation with Hierarchical Context Interaction

Zehua Cheng, Di Yuan, Wenhu Zhang, Thomas Lukasiewicz; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 9378-9387

The U-Net models have become the predominant architecture within the domain of medical image segmentation. Recent advancements have showcased the potential of incorporating attention-based techniques into U-Net structures. Nevertheless the inclusion of attention mechanisms often leads to a substantial increase in both computational demands and the number of parameters with only a marginal improvement in the performance. This observation raises a critical evaluation of the efficiency associated with the integration of attention modules. In this paper we propose a novel methodology termed Hierarchical Context Interaction (HCI) a parameter-efficient attention-free enhancement that can be seamlessly incorporated into U-Net-based models. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed HCI module attains state-of-the-art performance on two widely used benchmarks i.e. Medical Segmentation Decathlon Datasets and Synapse Datasets while concurrently sustaining a computationally efficient profile comparable to conventional U-Net configurations.