TUMamba: A novel tongue segment methods based on Mamba and U-Net

Background and objective: Current tongue segmentation methods often struggle with extracting global features and performing selective filtering, particularly in complex environments where background objects resemble the tongue. These challenges significantly reduce segmentation efficiency. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel model for tongue segmentation in complex environments, combining Mamba and U-Net. By leveraging Mamba's global feature selection capabilities, this model assists U-Net in accurately excluding tongue-like objects from the background, thereby enhancing segmentation accuracy and efficiency.

Methods: To improved the segmentation accuracy of the U-Net backbone model, we incorporated the Mamba attention module along with a multi-stage feature fusion module. The Mamba attention module serially connects spatial and channel attention mechanisms at the U-Net 's skip connections, selectively filtering the feature maps passed into the deep network. Additionally, the multi-stage feature fusion module integrates feature maps from different stages, further improving segmentation performance.

Results: Compared with state-of-the-art semantic segmentation and tongue segmentation models, our model improved the mean intersection over union by 1.17%. Ablation experiments further demonstrated that each module proposed in this study contributes to enhancing the model's segmentation efficiency.

Conclusion: This study constructs a Tongue segmentation model based on U-Net and Mamba (TUMamba). The model effectively extracted global spatial and channel features using the Mamba attention module, captured local detail features through U-Net, and enhanced image features via multi-stage feature fusion. The results demonstrate that the model performs exceptionally well in tongue segmentation tasks, proving its value in handling complex environments.