MFAINet: Multi-receptive field feature fusion with attention-integrated for polyp segmentation

Colorectal cancer has become a global public health concern. Removing polyps before they become malignant can effectively prevent the onset of colorectal cancer. Currently, multi-receptive field feature extraction and attention mechanisms have achieved significant success in polyp segmentation. However, how to effectively fuse these mechanisms and fully leverage their respective strengths remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a polyp segmentation network, MFAINet. We design an attention-integrated multi-receptive field feature extraction module (AMFE), which uses layering and multiple weightings to fuse the multi-receptive field feature extraction and attention mechanisms, maximizing the extraction of both global and detailed information from the image. To ensure that the input to AMFE contains richer target feature information, we introduce a multilayer progressive fusion module (MPF). MPF progressively merges features at each layer, fully integrating contextual information. Finally, we employ the selective fusion module (SFM) to combine the high-level features produced by AMFE, resulting in an accurate polyp segmentation map. To evaluate the learning and generalization capabilities of MFAINet, we conduct experiments on five widely-used public polyp datasets using four evaluation metrics. Notably, our model achieves the best results in nearly all cases.