CI-UNet: melding convnext and cross-dimensional attention for robust medical image segmentation

Deep learning-based methods have recently shown great promise in medical image segmentation task. However, CNN-based frameworks struggle with inadequate long-range spatial dependency capture, whereas Transformers suffer from computational inefficiency and necessitate substantial volumes of labeled data for effective training. To tackle these issues, this paper introduces CI-UNet, a novel architecture that utilizes ConvNeXt as its encoder, amalgamating the computational efficiency and feature extraction capabilities. Moreover, an advanced attention mechanism is proposed to captures intricate cross-dimensional interactions and global context. Extensive experiments on two segmentation datasets, namely BCSD, and CT2USforKidneySeg, confirm the excellent performance of the proposed CI-UNet as compared to other segmentation methods.