WVM-UNet: A Wavelet–Vision Mamba Framework for Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation
Accurate segmentation of skin lesions and gastrointestinal polyps is essential for early diagnosis and treatment planning. Currently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are limited by local receptive fields, missing small lesions. While Transformers model global context, their quadratic computational complexity incurs high costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Wavelet–Vision Mamba UNet (WVM-UNet), integrating State Space Models (SSMs) for linear-complexity long-range dependencies and wavelet transforms for fine-grained feature extraction. The network employs a Wavelet-based Residual State Space (WRSS) block, combining the multi-scale decomposition of discrete wavelet transforms with Vision Mamba to efficiently capture global features. A Fused Channel–Spatial Attention (FCSA) mechanism is incorporated to adaptively recalibrate feature representations. Additionally, we construct an Encoder–Decoder Semantic Connection (EDSC) to replace traditional skip connections, effectively bridging the semantic gap between cross-level features. Experimental results on multiple public datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our method. Specifically, on the ISIC 2017 dataset, WVM-UNet achieves an mIoU of 82.94% and a DSC of 90.67%, outperforming the Mamba-based VM-UNet by 2.71% in mIoU. These results indicate our architecture effectively captures discriminative features for precise medical image segmentation.