GMSRF-Net: An Improved generalizability with Global Multi-Scale Residual Fusion Network for Polyp Segmentation

Colonoscopy is a gold standard procedure but is highly operator-dependent. Efforts have been made to automate the detection and segmentation of polyps, a precancerous precursor, to effectively minimize missed rate. Widely used computer-aided polyp segmentation systems actuated by encoder-decoder have achieved high performance in terms of accuracy. However, polyp segmentation datasets collected from varied centers can follow different imaging protocols leading to difference in data distribution. As a result, most methods suffer from performance drop when trained and tested on different distributions and therefore, require re-training for each specific dataset. We address this generalizability issue by proposing a global multi-scale residual fusion network (GMSRF-Net). Our proposed network maintains high-resolution representations by performing multi-scale fusion operations across all resolution scales through dense connections while preserving low-level information. To further leverage scale information, we design cross multi-scale attention (CMSA) module that uses multi-scale features to identify, keep, and propagate informative features. Additionally, we introduce multi-scale feature selection (MSFS) modules to perform channel-wise attention that gates irrelevant features gathered through global multi-scale fusion within the GMSRF-Net. The repeated fusion operations gated by CMSA and MSFS demonstrate improved generalizability of our network.Experiments conducted on two different polyp segmentation datasets show that our proposed GMSRF-Net outperforms the previous top-performing state-of-the-art method by 8.34% and 10.31% on unseen CVC-ClinicDB and on unseen Kvasir-SEG, in terms of dice coefficient. Additionally, when tested on unseen CVC-ColonDB, we surpass the state-of-the-art method by 9.38% and 4.04% in terms of dice coefficient, when source dataset is Kvasir-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB, respectively.