Paper ID: 2202.03430

A Topology-Attention ConvLSTM Network and Its Application to EM Images

Jiaqi Yang, Xiaoling Hu, Chao Chen, Chialing Tsai

Structural accuracy of segmentation is important for finescale structures in biomedical images. We propose a novel TopologyAttention ConvLSTM Network (TACNet) for 3D image segmentation in order to achieve high structural accuracy for 3D segmentation tasks. Specifically, we propose a Spatial Topology-Attention (STA) module to process a 3D image as a stack of 2D image slices and adopt ConvLSTM to leverage contextual structure information from adjacent slices. In order to effectively transfer topology-critical information across slices, we propose an Iterative-Topology Attention (ITA) module that provides a more stable topology-critical map for segmentation. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our proposed method outperforms various baselines in terms of topology-aware evaluation metrics.

Submitted: Feb 7, 2022