Even though convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are driving progress in medical image segmentation, standard models still have some drawbacks. First, the use of multi-scale approaches, i.e., encoder-decoder architectures, leads to a redundant use of information, where similar low-level features are extracted multiple times at multiple scales. Second, long-range feature dependencies are not efficiently modeled, resulting in non-optimal discriminative feature representations associated with each semantic class. In this paper we attempt to overcome these limitations with the proposed architecture, by capturing richer contextual dependencies based on the use of guided self-attention mechanisms. This approach is able to integrate local features with their corresponding global dependencies, as well as highlight interdependent channel maps in an adaptive manner. Further, the additional loss between different modules guides the attention mechanisms to remove the noise and focus on more discriminant regions of the image by emphasizing relevant feature associations. We evaluate the proposed model in the context of abdominal organ segmentation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A series of ablation experiments support the importance of these attention modules in the proposed architecture. In addition, compared to other state-of-the-art segmentation networks our model yields better segmentation performance, increasing the accuracy of the predictions while reducing the standard deviation. This demonstrates the efficiency of our approach to generate precise and reliable automatic segmentations of medical images. Our code and the trained model are made publicly available at: https://github.com/sinAshish/Multi-Scale-Attention

采用引导自我关注机制的卷积神经网络模型对医学图像进行语义分割，能够更好地捕捉图像中的上下文依赖关系，去除冗余的信息提取并集成本地特征和全局依赖，强调相关特征关联，从而取得更好的分割效果。

医学图像分割的多尺度自引导注意力