SCAGC-UNet: Graph Convolutional Network with Spatial and Channel Attention for Medical Image Segmentation.

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Abstract

Medical image segmentation is critical for clinical diagnosis, yet existing methods face a persistent trade-off: CNN-based approaches are constrained by local receptive fields, while Transformer-based methods suffer from semantic dilution when modeling global context. To address these limitations, we propose SCAGC-UNet, a region-aware graph convolutional network that bridges local detail extraction and global dependency modeling through structured region-level reasoning. The architecture features a dual-layer residual encoder for hierarchical feature extraction and a Spatial-Channel Graph Convolution (SC-GCN) module at the bottleneck, which simultaneously captures inter-region spatial topology and intra-region channel semantics via dual-branch graph inference. Feature refinement in the decoder is further enhanced by Context-Corrected Modules and Backward-Aided Modules to reduce the semantic gap across skip connections. We validate SCAGC-UNet on three public benchmarks covering distinct imaging challenges. On Kvasir-SEG, the model achieves a Dice score of 92.28% and MIOU of 92.41%, surpassing the strongest CNN-based baseline CCBANet by 0.73% in DSC and outperforming TransUNet by 11.76% in DSC. On BUSI, it attains an IOU of 78.10% and MIOU of 87.68%, outperforming UNet by 2.82% in IOU and TransUNet by 6.91% in DSC. On COVID-19 CT, it achieves a DSC of 82.51%, surpassing UNet by 4.99% and TransUNet by 7.47%, demonstrating robust performance on irregular lesion morphologies. These results confirm that SCAGC-UNet achieves consistent and robust segmentation performance across three public benchmark datasets spanning distinct imaging modalities, suggesting its potential clinical relevance.

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