{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T18:06:41Z","timestamp":1785434801961,"version":"3.56.0"},"reference-count":28,"publisher":"Public Library of Science (PLoS)","issue":"7","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1785369600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Doctoral Training Centre at Swansea University","award":["UKRI Grant EP\/W020408\/1 and Grant RS718"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["UKRI Grant EP\/W020408\/1 and Grant RS718"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["www.plosone.org"],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["PLoS One"],"abstract":"<jats:p>\n                    For medical image segmentation, accurately balancing local details and global long-range dependencies is critical to tackling thyroid nodule challenges (variable sizes, ambiguous boundaries, complex context). Traditional CNNs excel at local feature extraction but are constrained by local receptive fields, hindering efficient global dependency modeling. To address this, we propose a Parallel Mamba Dual-U Network (PM-DUNet). It adopts a cascaded dual U-Net encoder-decoder for two-stage \u201ccoarse-to-fine\u201d segmentation refinement. We design a Multi-Path Parallel Mamba (MPM) module\u2014using State Space Models (SSMs)\u2014to efficiently model global context with linear complexity. Additionally, Squeeze-Excitation Downsampling (SED) and Spatial Attention Upsampling (SAU) modules are integrated to adaptively enhance key features in encoding\/decoding. Results show PM-DUNet achieves highly competitive performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on most core metrics, verifying its effectiveness and robustness for complex medical image segmentation. Our code is available on\n                    <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/xlink\" ext-link-type=\"uri\" xlink:href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/Andrevict\/MPDUNet\" xlink:type=\"simple\">https:\/\/github.com\/Andrevict\/MPDUNet<\/jats:ext-link>\n                    .\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0353684","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T17:45:33Z","timestamp":1785433533000},"page":"e0353684","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pone.corrections_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["PM-DUnet: Fusing long-range dependencies and attention in a dual-U architecture for thyroid nodule segmentation"],"prefix":"10.1371","volume":"21","author":[{"given":"Shaoqiang","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Linhao","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Guiling","family":"Shi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Zhongran","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yuanyuan","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Tiyao","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yawu","family":"Zhao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yuchen","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0371-9646","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Xiaochun","family":"Cheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"340","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]]},"reference":[{"issue":"1","key":"pone.0353684.ref001","first-page":"1","article-title":"2017 ATA Guidelines for the Management of Thyroid Nodules and Differentiated Thyroid Cancer","volume":"26","author":"BR Haugen","year":"2017","journal-title":"Thyroid"},{"key":"pone.0353684.ref002","unstructured":"Society AC. 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