Dual-Path Attention Compensation U-Net for Stroke Lesion Segmentation

For the segmentation task of stroke lesions, using the attention U-Net model based on the self-attention mechanism can suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for specific tasks. However, when the lesion is small and the lesion contour is blurred, attention U-Net may generate wrong attention coefficient maps, leading to incorrect segmentation results. To cope with this issue, we propose a dual-path attention compensation U-Net (DPAC-UNet) network, which consists of a primary network and auxiliary path network. Both networks are attention U-Net models and identical in structure. The primary path network is the core network that performs accurate lesion segmentation and outputting of the final segmentation result. The auxiliary path network generates auxiliary attention compensation coefficients and sends them to the primary path network to compensate for and correct possible attention coefficient errors. To realize the compensation mechanism of DPAC-UNet, we propose a weighted binary cross-entropy Tversky (WBCE-Tversky) loss to train the primary path network to achieve accurate segmentation and propose another compound loss function called tolerance loss to train the auxiliary path network to generate auxiliary compensation attention coefficient maps with expanded coverage area to perform compensate operations. We conducted segmentation experiments using the 239 MRI scans of the anatomical tracings of lesions after stroke (ATLAS) dataset to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of our method. The experimental results show that the DSC score of the proposed DPAC-UNet network is 6% higher than the single-path attention U-Net. It is also higher than the existing segmentation methods of the related literature. Therefore, our method demonstrates powerful abilities in the application of stroke lesion segmentation.