Multi-scale and multi-path cascaded convolutional network for semantic segmentation of colorectal polyps

Colorectal polyps are structural abnormalities of the gastrointestinal tract that can potentially become cancerous in some cases. The study introduces a novel framework for colorectal polyp segmentation named the Multi-Scale and Multi-Path Cascaded Convolution Network (MMCC-Net), aimed at addressing the limitations of existing models, such as inadequate spatial dependence representation and the absence of multi-level feature integration during the decoding stage by integrating multi-scale and multi-path cascaded convolutional techniques and enhances feature aggregation through dual attention modules, skip connections, and a feature enhancer. MMCC-Net achieves superior performance in identifying polyp areas at the pixel level. The Proposed MMCC-Net was tested across six public datasets and compared against eight SOTA models to demonstrate its efficiency in polyp segmentation. The MMCC-Net's performance shows Dice scores with confidence interval ranging between 77.43 ± 0.12, (77.08, 77.56) and 94.45 ± 0.12, (94.19, 94.71) and Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU) scores with confidence interval ranging from 72.71 ± 0.19, (72.20, 73.00) to 90.16 ± 0.16, (89.69, 90.53) on the six databases. These results highlight the model's potential as a powerful tool for accurate and efficient polyp segmentation, contributing to early detection and prevention strategies in colorectal cancer.