DSCANet: Integrating dual encoder and spatial cross-attention for polyp segmentation

Colonoscopy is a crucial clinical procedure for detecting colorectal polyps, which are strongly associated with the development of colon cancer. This endoscopic technique plays a vital role in both cancer prevention and early diagnosis. Accurate and efficient polyp segmentation is critical for enhancing the diagnostic reliability and clinical utility of colonoscopy. However, achieving precise segmentation presents significant challenges, primarily due to the diversity of polyps in their size and shape, coupled with poorly defined boundaries between polyps and surrounding tissues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel segmentation network, named DSCANet, which is a dual-branch encoder-structured network designed to efficiently fuse body and edge features for high-precision medical image segmentation. DSCANet integrates four key modules: a dual-branch encoder, a spatial cross-attention (SCA) module, a bipolar fusion (BF) module, and a flexible axis-attention (FAA) module. The dual-branch encoder consists of separate body and edge encoders, which extract respective features independently. The SCA module bridges the semantic gap between the two encoders’ features. The BF module fuses the shallowest and deepest features, while the FAA module assists the decoder in extracting semantic information from high-level features. DSCANet achieved superior performance on multiple colorectal polyp segmentation datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Shantdst/DSCANet.