SymTC: A symbiotic Transformer-CNN net for instance segmentation of lumbar spine MRI

Jiasong Chen, Linchen Qian, Linhai Ma, Timur Urakov, Weiyong Gu, Liang Liang

Abstract: Highlights•SymTC, a novel network for lumbar spine MR image segmentation.•SymTC integrates the strengths of Transformer and CNN through parallel dual-path.•A novel relative position embedding for self-attention in Transformer of SymTC.•A new method based on SSM and biomechanics to generate synthetic yet realistic data.•SymTC outperforms the other 16 representative models on our datasets.