# MDA-Net: Multi-Dimensional Attention-Based Neural Network for 3D Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04508 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04508/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [Concurrent Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation in Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02579/) (2018)
- [Volumetric Attention for 3D Medical Image Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01997/) (2020)
- [A Partially Reversible U-Net for Memory-Efficient Volumetric Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06148/) (2019)
- [Hybrid Cascaded Neural Network for Liver Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04797/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Segmenting an entire 3D image often has high computational complexity and requires large memory consumption; by contrast, performing volumetric segmentation in a slice-by-slice manner is efficient but does not fully leverage the 3D data. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-dimensional attention network (MDA-Net) to efficiently integrate slice-wise, spatial, and channel-wise attention into a U-Net based network, which results in high segmentation accuracy with a low computational cost. We evaluate our model on the MICCAI iSeg and IBSR datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods.