Focal cross transformer: multi-view brain tumor segmentation model based on cross window and focal self-attention

INTRODUCTION: Recently, the Transformer model and its variants have been a great success in terms of computer vision, and have surpassed the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNN). The key to the success of Transformer vision is the acquisition of short-term and long-term visual dependencies through self-attention mechanisms; this technology can efficiently learn global and remote semantic information interactions. However, there are certain challenges associated with the use of Transformers. The computational cost of the global self-attention mechanism increases quadratically, thus hindering the application of Transformers for high-resolution images. METHODS: In view of this, this paper proposes a multi-view brain tumor segmentation model based on cross windows and focal self-attention which represents a novel mechanism to enlarge the receptive field by parallel cross windows and improve global dependence by using local fine-grained and global coarse-grained interactions. First, the receiving field is increased by parallelizing the self-attention of horizontal and vertical fringes in the cross window, thus achieving strong modeling capability while limiting the computational cost. Second, the focus on self-attention with regards to local fine-grained and global coarse-grained interactions enables the model to capture short-term and long-term visual dependencies in an efficient manner. RESULTS: Finally, the performance of the model on Brats2021 verification set is as follows: dice Similarity Score of 87.28, 87.35 and 93.28%; Hausdorff Distance (95%) of 4.58 mm, 5.26 mm, 3.78 mm for the enhancing tumor, tumor core and whole tumor, respectively. DISCUSSION: In summary, the model proposed in this paper has achieved excellent performance while limiting the computational cost.