Selective and multi-scale fusion Mamba for medical image segmentation

Given the high variability in the morphology and size of lesion areas in medical images, accurate medical image segmentation requires both precise positioning of global contours and careful processing of local boundaries. This emphasizes the importance of fusing multi-scale local and global features. However, existing CNN and Transformer-based models are often limited by high parameter counts and complex calculations, making it difficult to efficiently integrate these features. To address this challenge, we proposed two innovative optimization architectures: Selective Fusion Mamba (SF-Mamba) and Multi-Scale Fusion Mamba (MF-Mamba). SF-Mamba can flexibly and dynamically adjust the fusion strategy of local and global features according to the characteristics of the lesions, effectively handling segmentation tasks with variable morphology. MF-Mamba enhances the model's segmentation ability for lesions of different sizes by capturing global information across scales. Based on these two structures, we constructed a lightweight SMM-UNet model, which not only significantly reduces the computational burden (with only 0.038M parameters) but also demonstrates excellent generalization ability and can efficiently adapt to various types of medical images. Extensive tests on the ISIC2017, ISIC2018, and BUSI public datasets show that SMM-UNet achieves excellent segmentation performance with an extremely low parameter cost. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd