U-MAN: U-Net with Multi-scale Adaptive KAN Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract: Medical image segmentation faces significant challenges in preserving fine-grained details and precise boundaries due to complex anatomical structures and pathological regions. These challenges primarily stem from two key limitations of conventional U-Net architectures: (1) their simple skip connections ignore the encoder-decoder semantic gap between various features, and (2) they lack the capability for multi-scale feature extraction in deep layers. To address these challenges, we propose the U-Net with Multi-scale Adaptive KAN (U-MAN), a novel architecture that enhances the emerging Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) with two specialized modules: Progressive Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (PAGF) and the Multi-scale Adaptive KAN (MAN). Our PAGF module replaces the simple skip connection, using attention to fuse features from the encoder and decoder. The MAN module enables the network to adaptively process features at multiple scales, improving its ability to segment objects of various sizes. Experiments on three public datasets (BUSI, GLAS, and CVC) show that U-MAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in defining accurate boundaries and preserving fine details.