When Medical Imaging Met Self-Attention: A Love Story That Didn't Quite Work out

Tristan Piater, Niklas Penzel, Gideon Stein, Joachim Denzler

Abstract: A substantial body of research has focused on developing systems that assist medical professionals during labor-intensive early screening processes, many based on convolutional deep-learning architectures. Recently, multiple studies explored the application of so-called self-attention mechanisms in the vision domain. These studies often report empirical improvements over fully convolutional approaches on various datasets and tasks. To evaluate this trend for medical imaging, we extend two widely adopted convolutional architectures with different self-attention variants on two different medical datasets. With this, we aim to specifically evaluate the possible advantages of additional self-attention. We compare our models with similarly sized convolutional and attention-based baselines and evaluate performance gains statistically. Additionally, we investigate how including such layers changes the features learned by these models during the training. Following a hyperparameter search, a