Unet++: A nested u-net architecture for medical image segmentation

Z Zhou, MM Rahman Siddiquee, N Tajbakhsh… - Deep Learning in …, 2018 - Springer
Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis and Multimodal Learning for Clinical …, 2018Springer
In this paper, we present UNet++, a new, more powerful architecture for medical image
segmentation. Our architecture is essentially a deeply-supervised encoder-decoder network
where the encoder and decoder sub-networks are connected through a series of nested,
dense skip pathways. The re-designed skip pathways aim at reducing the semantic gap
between the feature maps of the encoder and decoder sub-networks. We argue that the
optimizer would deal with an easier learning task when the feature maps from the decoder …
Abstract
In this paper, we present UNet++, a new, more powerful architecture for medical image segmentation. Our architecture is essentially a deeply-supervised encoder-decoder network where the encoder and decoder sub-networks are connected through a series of nested, dense skip pathways. The re-designed skip pathways aim at reducing the semantic gap between the feature maps of the encoder and decoder sub-networks. We argue that the optimizer would deal with an easier learning task when the feature maps from the decoder and encoder networks are semantically similar. We have evaluated UNet++ in comparison with U-Net and wide U-Net architectures across multiple medical image segmentation tasks: nodule segmentation in the low-dose CT scans of chest, nuclei segmentation in the microscopy images, liver segmentation in abdominal CT scans, and polyp segmentation in colonoscopy videos. Our experiments demonstrate that UNet++ with deep supervision achieves an average IoU gain of 3.9 and 3.4 points over U-Net and wide U-Net, respectively.
Springer