CDGC-Net: 3D Medical Image Segmentation with Cooperative Dual-Scale Self-Attention and Grouped Channel Modeling

Abstract

Accurate 3D medical image segmentation requires the integration of long-range anatomical context with fine boundary detail. Existing methods often model global and local features in separate modules or feature levels and perform channel recalibration independently. This may cause semantic mismatch between global context and local boundaries, insufficient channel relationship modeling, weak spatial-channel interaction, and redundant representations. We propose CDGC-Net, a 3D medical image segmentation network that combines cooperative dual-scale spatial attention with grouped hierarchical channel modeling. With-in each CDGC block, Cooperative Dual-Scale Self-Attention (CDSA) assigns attention heads to parallel local-window and global-sparse branches. The two branches capture fine spatial details and long-range anatomical context at the same feature level. Their outputs are concatenated into an $N\times C$ spatial representation and directly passed to Grouped Hierarchical Channel Attention (GHCA). GHCA organizes the channels into $r$ groups and models both within-group and cross-group dependencies. CDSA and GHCA reuse a shared key projection to maintain a consistent feature reference. Residual feature alignment subsequently integrates the refined features with the original representation. On the Synapse, ACDC, BraTS, and LA datasets, CDGC-Net achieved mean DSC values of 86.96\%, 92.91\%, 82.56\%, and 93.52\%, respectively, exceeding the next-highest reported values by 0.39, 0.47, 0.17, and 0.32 percentage points. CDGC-Net contains 25.83M parameters and 28.62G FLOPs for an input size of $64\times128\times128$, reducing these quantities by 39.87\% and 40.30\%, respectively, relative to UNETR++. These results indicate a favorable trade-off between segmentation accuracy and computational complexity.