SCSGNet: Spatial-Correlated and Shape-Guided Network for Breast Mass Segmentation

Abstract

Automatic and accurate breast mass segmentation plays a crucial role in the early diagnosis of breast cancer. However, it has been a challenging task for two main reasons: (1) Breast masses are diverse; and (2) The boundaries of masses are ambiguous. To address these problems, we propose a Spatial-Correlated and Shape-Guided Network (SCSGNet), which combines global context extraction with local boundary refinement. Specifically, the high-level features are aggregated to produce a global map as the initial guidance area, and a Series-Parallel Feature Fusion (SPFF) module is added to capture masses of different shapes and sizes. Besides, we design a Dynamic Long-range Correlation Capture (DLCC) module to capture the spatial correlation of masses at different positions. Finally, we devise a Triplet Attention Guide (TAG) module to iteratively update the feature map and refine the boundary. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods.