Medical Image Segmentation with a Simplified U-Net Architecture

Published on June 9, 2022

Creating a masterpiece requires the right tools, and the same goes for medical image segmentation! U-Net has been the go-to architecture for this task, but researchers wondered if there was room for improvement. In their quest for optimization, they explored the effects of different parts of the U-Net and developed a more efficient alternative called Half-UNet. Think of it as an upgraded version of U-Net, with a simplified encoder and decoder. This new architecture takes advantage of channel unification, full-scale feature fusion, and Ghost modules to enhance its performance. To put Half-UNet to the test, they compared it to U-Net and its variants across three medical image segmentation tasks: mammography, lung nodule detection, and MRI image segmentation. The results? Half-UNet showcased similar segmentation accuracy while significantly reducing parameters and floating-point operations by 98.6% and 81.8%, respectively, compared to U-Net. Mind-blowing, right? If you want to dive deeper into the research and learn more about this groundbreaking approach, check out the full article!

Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in computer-aided diagnosis procedures. Recently, U-Net is widely used in medical image segmentation. Many variants of U-Net have been proposed, which attempt to improve the network performance while keeping the U-shaped structure unchanged. However, this U-shaped structure is not necessarily optimal. In this article, the effects of different parts of the U-Net on the segmentation ability are experimentally analyzed. Then a more efficient architecture, Half-UNet, is proposed. The proposed architecture is essentially an encoder-decoder network based on the U-Net structure, in which both the encoder and decoder are simplified. The re-designed architecture takes advantage of the unification of channel numbers, full-scale feature fusion, and Ghost modules. We compared Half-UNet with U-Net and its variants across multiple medical image segmentation tasks: mammography segmentation, lung nodule segmentation in the CT images, and left ventricular MRI image segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that Half-UNet has similar segmentation accuracy compared U-Net and its variants, while the parameters and floating-point operations are reduced by 98.6 and 81.8%, respectively, compared with U-Net.

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