FEGNet: A Feedback Enhancement Gate Network for Automatic Polyp Segmentation

Abstract

Regular colonoscopy is an effective way to prevent colorectal cancer by detecting colorectal polyps. Automatic polyp segmentation significantly aids clinicians in precisely locating polyp areas for further diagnosis. However, polyp segmentation is a challenge problem, since polyps appear in a variety of shapes, sizes and textures, and they tend to have ambiguous boundaries. In this paper, we propose a U-shaped model named Feedback Enhancement Gate Network (FEGNet) for accurate polyp segmentation to overcome these difficulties. Specifically, for the high-level features, we design a novel Recurrent Gate Module (RGM) based on the feedback mechanism, which can refine attention maps without any additional parameters. RGM consists of Feature Aggregation Attention Gate (FAAG) and Multi-Scale Module (MSM). FAAG can aggregate context and feedback information, and MSM is applied for capturing multi-scale information, which is critical for the segmentation task. In addition, we propose a straightforward but effective edge extraction module to detect boundaries of polyps for low-level features, which is used to guide the training of early features. In our experiments, quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that the proposed FEGNet has achieved the best results in polyp segmentation compared to other state-of-the-art models on five colonoscopy datasets.