MCFF-Net: Multi-Scale Contextual Feature Fusion Network for Polyp Segmentation

In clinical practice, technologies for automatically segmenting polyps might greatly improve the speed and accuracy of medical diagnosis, significantly reducing the chances of patients developing colorectal cancer. Nevertheless, the segmentation of polyps presents a considerable challenge due to their low contrast, presence of occlusion, and intricate background disturbances. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach for segmenting polyps, called multi-scale contextual feature fusion network for polyp segmentation (MCFF-Net). Specifically, MCFF-Net includes three modules: feature enhancement module (FEM), global-local feature fusion module (GLFF), and cross-scale feature fusion module (CFFM). Among them, FEM is used to improve the features at each scale. Building on this, the CFFM enables comprehensive interaction among the information across various scales, enhancing the diversity of the feature scales extracted. Moreover, the GLFF fuses global-local features to generate a rough object localization map. This map further modulates the fusion features from the CFFM, facilitating more precise segmentation. On five publicly available datasets, our approach not only segments various polyp types but also surpasses existing methods in terms of accuracy and generalizability.