BEGA-UNet: Boundary-Explicit Guided Attention U-Net with Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation for Colonoscopic Polyp Segmentation

Accurate polyp segmentation from colonoscopy images is critical for colorectal cancer prevention, yet the generalization of deep learning models under domain shift remains insufficiently explored. We propose Boundary-Explicit Guided Attention U-Net (BEGA-UNet), a boundary-aware segmentation architecture that introduces explicit edge modeling as a structural inductive bias to enhance both segmentation accuracy and cross-domain robustness. The framework integrates three components: an Edge-Guided Module (EGM) with learnable Sobel-initialized operators to capture boundary cues, a Dual-Path Attention (DPA) module that processes channel and spatial attention in parallel, and a Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation (MSFA) module to encode contextual information across multiple receptive fields. Evaluated on the combined Kvasir-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB benchmarks, BEGA-UNet achieves 88.53% Dice and 82.51% IoU, outperforming representative convolutional and transformer-based baselines. More importantly, cross-dataset evaluation demonstrates strong robustness under domain shift, with BEGA-UNet retaining 83.2% of its in-distribution performance-substantially higher than U-Net (64.5%), Attention U-Net (47.5%), and TransUNet (53.1%). In a zero-shot setting on an entirely unseen dataset, the model further maintains 72.6% performance retention. Comprehensive ablation studies indicate that explicit boundary modeling plays a central role in improving generalization, while multi-scale context aggregation further stabilizes performance across domains. Feature distribution analyses support this observation by showing that edge-oriented representations exhibit markedly reduced cross-domain variability compared to appearance-driven features. Overall, BEGA-UNet provides an effective and interpretable solution for robust polyp segmentation, demonstrating that explicit boundary modeling serves as a critical inductive bias for ensuring reliability under clinical domain shifts.