# Exploiting Scale-Variant Attention for Segmenting Small Medical Objects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07720 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07720/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [CellViT: Vision Transformers for Precise Cell Segmentation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15350/) (2023)
- [The KiTS21 Challenge: Automatic segmentation of kidneys, renal tumors, and renal cysts in corticomedullary-phase CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01984/) (2023)
- [A multi-centre polyp detection and segmentation dataset for generalisability assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04463/) (2021)
- [CaraNet: Context Axial Reverse Attention Network for Segmentation of Small Medical Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13366/) (2023)
- [TransNetR: Transformer-based Residual Network for Polyp Segmentation with Multi-Center Out-of-Distribution Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07428/) (2023)
- [Mediastinal lymph nodes segmentation using 3D convolutional neural network ensembles and anatomical priors guiding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06515/) (2021)
- [DPNet: Dual-Path Network for Real-time Object Detection with Lightweight Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13933/) (2022)
- [Deeply Supervised Skin Lesions Diagnosis with Stage and Branch Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04326/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MobileViM: A Light-weight and Dimension-independent Vision Mamba for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13524/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Early detection and accurate diagnosis can predict the risk of malignant disease transformation, thereby increasing the probability of effective treatment. Identifying mild syndrome with small pathological regions serves as an ominous warning and is fundamental in the early diagnosis of diseases. While deep learning algorithms, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown promise in segmenting medical objects, analyzing small areas in medical images remains challenging. This difficulty arises due to information losses and compression defects from convolution and pooling operations in CNNs, which become more pronounced as the network deepens, especially for small medical objects. To address these challenges, we propose a novel scale-variant attention-based network (SvANet) for accurately segmenting small-scale objects in medical images. The SvANet consists of scale-variant attention, cross-scale guidance, Monte Carlo attention, and vision transformer, which incorporates cross-scale features and alleviates compression artifacts for enhancing the discrimination of small medical objects. Quantitative experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of SvANet, achieving 96.12%, 96.11%, 89.79%, 84.15%, 80.25%, 73.05%, and 72.58% in mean Dice coefficient for segmenting kidney tumors, skin lesions, hepatic tumors, polyps, surgical excision cells, retinal vasculatures, and sperms, which occupy less than 1% of the image areas in KiTS23, ISIC 2018, ATLAS, PolypGen, TissueNet, FIVES, and SpermHealth datasets, respectively.