PM-DUnet: Fusing long-range dependencies and attention in a dual-U architecture for thyroid nodule segmentation

Abstract

For medical image segmentation, accurately balancing local details and global long-range dependencies is critical to tackling thyroid nodule challenges (variable sizes, ambiguous boundaries, complex context). Traditional CNNs excel at local feature extraction but are constrained by local receptive fields, hindering efficient global dependency modeling. To address this, we propose a Parallel Mamba Dual-U Network (PM-DUNet). It adopts a cascaded dual U-Net encoder-decoder for two-stage “coarse-to-fine” segmentation refinement. We design a Multi-Path Parallel Mamba (MPM) module—using State Space Models (SSMs)—to efficiently model global context with linear complexity. Additionally, Squeeze-Excitation Downsampling (SED) and Spatial Attention Upsampling (SAU) modules are integrated to adaptively enhance key features in encoding/decoding. Results show PM-DUNet achieves highly competitive performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on most core metrics, verifying its effectiveness and robustness for complex medical image segmentation. Our code is available on https://github.com/Andrevict/MPDUNet .