ACL-DUNet: A tumor segmentation method based on multiple attention and densely connected breast ultrasound images

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Breast masses are one of the distinctive signs for diagnosing breast cancer, and ultrasound is widely used for screening as a non-invasive and effective method for breast examination. In this study, we used the Mendeley and BUSI datasets, comprising 250 images (100 benign, 150 malignant) and 780 images (133 normal, 487 benign, 210 malignant), respectively. The datasets were split into 80% for training and 20% for validation. The accurate measurement and characterization of different breast tumors play a crucial role in guiding clinical decision-making. The area and shape of the different breast tumors detected are critical for clinicians to make accurate diagnostic decisions. In this study, a deep learning method for mass segmentation in breast ultrasound images is proposed, which uses densely connected U-net with attention gates (AGs) as well as channel attention modules and scale attention modules for accurate breast tumor segmentation.The densely connected network is employed in the encoding stage to enhance the network's feature extraction capabilities. Three attention modules are integrated in the decoding stage to better capture the most relevant features. After validation on the Mendeley and BUSI datasets, the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.8764 and 0.8313, respectively, outperforming other deep learning approaches. The source code is located at github.com/zhanghaoCV/plos-one.