Multi-modal information plays a pivotal role in the segmentation of brain tumors. However, previous studies have largely overlooked the distinctive characteristics of individual modalities, which are correlated with the target tumor region due to distinct imaging principles. In this paper, we harness the distinctive traits of individual modalities and introduce a brain tumor segmentation model called specific modality guided brain tumor segmentation model (SMG-BTS). Our SMG-BTS adopts a three-branch encoder-decoder architecture. The main branch utilizes full modalities fused at input-level, while the two affiliated branches operate in parallel to provide guidance to the main branch in acquiring a robust representation. We propose a specific modality spatial guidance (SMSG) module to guide the process of feature extraction. Spatial information is obtained from selected modalities and utilized to enhance features extracted from the main branch. A shared-specific feature enhancement(SSFE) module is proposed to enhance the shared features across modalities and utilizes modality-specific features to further supplement specific information of modalities. Experimental results on the BraTS2021 benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SMG-BTS over state-of-the-art brain tumor segmentation methods.

X-ray images play an important role in the diagnosis of spinal diseases because of their convenient collection and easy observation. But it is time-consuming and challenging for radiologists to examine the differences between the vertebrae to diagnose abnormalities and locate lesions. Many existing methods try to extract the global features of radiographs and do not make full use of adjacent vertebrae variations. In this paper, we propose a novel Axial-aware neural network with Consecutive Attention Transformer (CAT), namely ACAT-Net, which takes advantage of the convolutional neural network and transformer as a new deep learning framework. A deep convolutional network extracts features of anteroposterior and lateral X-ray images that may have abnormalities in them. The consecutive attention transformer block is then used to focus on the morphological differences of axial adjacent vertebrae on the spines. The ingenious structure we designed can significantly reduce the amount of network parameters. Extensive experiments on clinical and public datasets show that our method is remarkably superior to other existing approaches in the spine X-ray image analysis.