Diffusion model-based text-guided enhancement network for medical image segmentation

In recent years, denoising diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating pixel-level representations with semantic values for image generation modeling. In this study, we propose a novel end-to-end framework, called TGEDiff, focusing on medical image segmentation. TGEDiff fuses a textual attention mechanism with the diffusion model by introducing an additional auxiliary categorization task to guide the diffusion model with textual information to generate excellent pixel-level representations. To overcome the limitation of limited perceptual fields for independent feature encoders within the diffusion model, we introduce a multi-kernel excitation module to extend the model’s perceptual capability. Meanwhile, a guided feature enhancement module is introduced in Denoising-UNet to focus the model’s attention on important regions and attenuate the influence of noise and irrelevant background in medical images. We critically evaluated TGEDiff on three datasets (Kvasir-SEG, Kvasir-Sessile, and GLaS), and TGEDiff achieved significant improvements over the state-of-the-art approach on all three datasets, with F1 scores and mIoU improving by 0.88% and 1.09%, 3.21% and 3.43%, respectively, 1.29% and 2.34%. These data validate that TGEDiff has excellent performance in medical image segmentation. TGEDiff is expected to facilitate accurate diagnosis and treatment of medical diseases through more precise deconvolutional structural segmentation.