Advantages of transformer and its application for medical image segmentation: a survey

This review comprises publications selected through a Web of Science search. We focused on papers published since 2018 that applied the transformer architecture to medical image segmentation. We conducted a systematic analysis of these studies and summarized the results.

To better comprehend the benefits of convolutional neural networks and transformers, the construction of the codec and transformer modules is first explained. Second, the medical image segmentation model based on transformer is summarized. The typically used assessment markers for medical image segmentation tasks are then listed. Finally, a large number of medical segmentation datasets are described.