ESKNet-An enhanced adaptive selection kernel convolution for breast tumors segmentation

Abstract: Breast cancer is one of the common cancers that endanger the health of women globally. Accurate target lesion segmentation is essential for early clinical intervention and postoperative follow-up. Recently, many convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed to segment breast tumors from ultrasound images. However, the complex ultrasound pattern and the variable tumor shape and size bring challenges to the accurate segmentation of the breast lesion. Motivated by the selective kernel convolution, we introduce an enhanced selective kernel convolution for breast tumor segmentation, which integrates multiple feature map region representations and adaptively recalibrates the weights of these feature map regions from the channel and spatial dimensions. This region recalibration strategy enables the network to focus more on high-contributing region features and mitigate the perturbation of less useful regions. Finally, the enhanced selective kernel convolution is integrated into U-net with deep supervision constraints to adaptively capture the robust representation of breast tumors. Extensive experiments with twelve state-of-the-art deep learning segmentation methods on three public breast ultrasound datasets demonstrate that our method has a more competitive segmentation performance in breast ultrasound images.