MDSK-Net: Multi-scale dynamic segmentation kernel network for renal tumour endoscopic image segmentation

Automatic segmentation of renal tumours during renal cell carcinoma surgery can help doctors accurately locate the tumour region, protect the tissues and organs around the kidneys, enhance surgical efficiency, and reduce the possibility of leakage and misdiagnosis. However, since general polyp endoscopic image segmentation models have many problems when facing the task of renal tumour segmentation, there needs to be more research on the segmentation of endoscopic images of renal tumours. This paper proposes a multi-scale dynamic segmentation kernel network for endoscopic image segmentation of kidney tumours. First, a spatial receptive field module is proposed to augment the feature information and improve the performance of the whole network. Second, an enhanced cross-attention module is offered to attenuate the effect of a high-similarity segmentation background. Finally, a multi-scale dynamic segmentation kernel module is introduced to gradually refine the segmentation results from small to large sizes to obtain more accurate tumour boundaries. Extensive experiments on the established kidney tumour endoscopic dataset and publicly available endoscopic datasets show that this method exhibits enhanced performance and generalization capabilities compared to existing techniques. On this renal tumour dataset, MDSK-Net achieved excellent results of 94.1% and 90.1% on mDice and mIoU.