ElaD-Net: An Elastic Semantic Decoupling Network for Lesion Segmentation in Breast Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Breast diseases pose a significant threat to women’s health. Automatic lesion segmentation in breast ultrasound images (BUSI) plays a crucial role in fast diagnosis. While various enhanced U-Net-based models have achieved success in multi-scale feature analysis and handling blurred boundaries, two key challenges persist that could guide the improvement of BUSI segmentation networks: 1) significant fluctuations in pixel intensity distribution similarity between the lesion and surrounding tissues, and 2) inconsistent transmission of spatial detail due to multi-scale lesion sampling. These issues highlight the necessity of semantic elasticity understanding and consistency control. To this end, we propose ElaD-Net, an Elastic Semantic Decoupling Network for lesion segmentation in BUSI. This network uses the pre-trained EfficientNet-B2 for multi-scale encoding of BUSI. The decoding stage features two key modules: Elastic Semantic Decoupling (ESD) and Spatial Semantic Reconstruction (SSR). ESD learns and decouples multi-frequency semantics in multi-scale channels with a self-calibration mechanism, enabling dynamic adjustment of receptive depth to resist similarity fluctuations. SSR further optimizes ESD outputs via feature branching, compression, and excitation to ensure spatial semantic consistency, thereby separately reconstructing edge and body.