# MugenNet: A Novel Combined Convolution Neural Network and Transformer Network with its Application for Colonic Polyp Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00726 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00726/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07069/) (2019)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [TransFuse: Fusing Transformers and CNNs for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08005/) (2021)
- [A Benchmark for Endoluminal Scene Segmentation of Colonoscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00799/) (2016)
- [ResUNet++: An Advanced Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07067/) (2019)
- [Shallow Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00882/) (2021)
- [HarDNet-MSEG: A Simple Encoder-Decoder Polyp Segmentation Neural Network that Achieves over 0.9 Mean Dice and 86 FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07172/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Context Selection for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04799/) (2023)
- [Enhanced U-Net: A Feature Enhancement Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00999/) (2021)
- [Duplex Contextual Relation Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06725/) (2021)
- [Parallel Residual Bi-Fusion Feature Pyramid Network for Accurate Single-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01724/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Biomedical image segmentation is a very important part in disease diagnosis. The term "colonic polyps" refers to polypoid lesions that occur on the surface of the colonic mucosa within the intestinal lumen. In clinical practice, early detection of polyps is conducted through colonoscopy examinations and biomedical image processing. Therefore, the accurate polyp image segmentation is of great significance in colonoscopy examinations. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a common automatic segmentation method, but its main disadvantage is the long training time. Transformer utilizes a self-attention mechanism, which essentially assigns different importance weights to each piece of information, thus achieving high computational efficiency during segmentation. However, a potential drawback is the risk of information loss. In the study reported in this paper, based on the well-known hybridization principle, we proposed a method to combine CNN and Transformer to retain the strengths of both, and we applied this method to build a system called MugenNet for colonic polyp image segmentation. We conducted a comprehensive experiment to compare MugenNet with other CNN models on five publicly available datasets. The ablation experiment on MugentNet was conducted as well. The experimental results show that MugenNet achieves significantly higher processing speed and accuracy compared with CNN alone. The generalized implication with our work is a method to optimally combine two complimentary methods of machine learning.