Yolov8n based on dynamic serpentine convolution and multi-feature attention for MRI brain cranial tumor segmentation

For MRI brain tumor image segmentation, it is necessary to have high real-time and accurate edge localization. Therefore, we propose a yolov8n based on dynamic serpentine convolution and multi-feature attention method (DMA-YOLOV8n). The method combines dynamic serpentine convolution and multi-feature attention mechanism, which can effectively adapt to different brain tumor tissue edge morphology changes and more accurately segmented to obtain brain tumor and locate its edge position. First, dynamic serpentine convolution is used to replace standard convolution in C2f. module. Then, drawing on the idea of skip connection in U-Net model, multi- feature fusion is used to connect multilayer sampling information to retain more feature details and improve edge segmentation accuracy. Finally, dual attention mechanism is added to multilayer feature fusion to pay more attention to brain tumor tissue. DMA-YOLOV8n is applied to brain MRI images from Kaggle₃M dataset. Experimental results show the method has mAP50: 0. 806 and mAP50: 95: 0. 490.