CA-Diff: Collaborative Anatomy Diffusion for Brain Tissue Segmentation
This addresses the challenge of precise brain tissue segmentation for medical imaging applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing diffusion models.
The paper tackled the problem of accurately segmenting brain structures from MRI by proposing CA-Diff, a diffusion model that integrates anatomical features, and it outperformed state-of-the-art methods in experiments.
Segmentation of brain structures from MRI is crucial for evaluating brain morphology, yet existing CNN and transformer-based methods struggle to delineate complex structures accurately. While current diffusion models have shown promise in image segmentation, they are inadequate when applied directly to brain MRI due to neglecting anatomical information. To address this, we propose Collaborative Anatomy Diffusion (CA-Diff), a framework integrating spatial anatomical features to enhance segmentation accuracy of the diffusion model. Specifically, we introduce distance field as an auxiliary anatomical condition to provide global spatial context, alongside a collaborative diffusion process to model its joint distribution with anatomical structures, enabling effective utilization of anatomical features for segmentation. Furthermore, we introduce a consistency loss to refine relationships between the distance field and anatomical structures and design a time adapted channel attention module to enhance the U-Net feature fusion procedure. Extensive experiments show that CA-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.