REVIEW article

Front. Oncol.

Sec. Gynecological Oncology

Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1555585

SMoFFI-SegFormer: A Novel Approach for Ovarian Tumor Segmentation Based on an Improved SegFormer Architecture

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Third Hospital of Xiamen, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China
  • 2Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
  • 3Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Ovarian cancer remains one of the most lethal gynecological malignancies, posing significant challenges for early detection due to its asymptomatic nature in early stages. Accurate segmentation of ovarian tumors from ultrasound images is critical for improving diagnostic accuracy and patient outcomes. In this study, we introduce SMoFFI-SegFormer, an advanced deep learning model specifically designed to enhance multi-scale feature representation and address the complexities of ovarian tumor segmentation. Building upon the SegFormer architecture, SMoFFI-SegFormer incorporates a novel Self-modulate Fusion with Feature Inhibition (SMoFFI) module that promotes cross-scale information exchange and effectively handles spatial heterogeneity within tumors. Through extensive experimentation on two public datasets-OTU_2D and OTU_CEUS-our model demonstrates superior performance with high overall accuracy, mean Intersection over Union (mIoU), and class accuracy. Specifically, SMoFFI-SegFormer achieves state-of-the-art results, significantly outperforming existing models in both segmentation precision and efficiency. This work paves the way for more reliable and automated tools in the diagnosis and management of ovarian cancer.

Keywords: Ovarian tumor segmentation, deep learning, SegFormer, SMoFFI module, Multi-scale feature fusion, feature inhibition

Received: 05 Jan 2025; Accepted: 20 May 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Xie, Huang, Sun, Huang and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Caixu Xu, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, 325035, Zhejiang Province, China

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