UKAN-EP: Enhancing U-KAN with Efficient Attention and Pyramid Aggregation for 3D Multi-Modal MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation
This work addresses automated segmentation of heterogeneous gliomas in clinical MRI, offering incremental improvements in accuracy and efficiency for medical imaging applications.
The paper tackled accurate and efficient 3D multi-modal MRI brain tumor segmentation by proposing UKAN-EP, which achieved superior performance with Dice = 0.9001 and IoU = 0.8257 for the whole tumor while using fewer computational resources.
Background: Gliomas are among the most common malignant brain tumors and exhibit substantial heterogeneity, complicating accurate detection and segmentation. Although multi-modal MRI is the clinical standard for glioma imaging, variability across modalities and high computational demands hamper effective automated segmentation. Methods: We propose UKAN-EP, a novel 3D extension of the original 2D U-KAN model for multi-modal MRI brain tumor segmentation. While U-KAN integrates Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) layers into a U-Net backbone, UKAN-EP further incorporates Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and Pyramid Feature Aggregation (PFA) modules to enhance inter-modality feature fusion and multi-scale feature representation. We also introduce a dynamic loss weighting strategy that adaptively balances cross-entropy and Dice losses during training. Results: On the 2024 BraTS-GLI dataset, UKAN-EP achieves superior segmentation performance (e.g., Dice = 0.9001 $\pm$ 0.0127 and IoU = 0.8257 $\pm$ 0.0186 for the whole tumor) while requiring substantially fewer computational resources (223.57 GFLOPs and 11.30M parameters) compared to strong baselines including U-Net, Attention U-Net, Swin UNETR, VT-Unet, TransBTS, and 3D U-KAN. An extensive ablation study further confirms the effectiveness of ECA and PFA and shows the limited utility of self-attention and spatial attention alternatives. Conclusion: UKAN-EP demonstrates that combining the expressive power of KAN layers with lightweight channel-wise attention and multi-scale feature aggregation improves the accuracy and efficiency of brain tumor segmentation.