Unet 3+: A full-scale connected unet for medical image segmentation

H Huang, L Lin, R Tong, H Hu, Q Zhang… - ICASSP 2020-2020 …, 2020 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
H Huang, L Lin, R Tong, H Hu, Q Zhang, Y Iwamoto, X Han, YW Chen, J Wu
ICASSP 2020-2020 IEEE international conference on acoustics …, 2020ieeexplore.ieee.org
Recently, a growing interest has been seen in deep learning-based semantic segmentation.
UNet, which is one of deep learning networks with an encoder-decoder architecture, is
widely used in medical image segmentation. Combining multi-scale features is one of
important factors for accurate segmentation. UNet++ was developed as a modified Unet by
designing an architecture with nested and dense skip connections. However, it does not
explore sufficient information from full scales and there is still a large room for improvement …
Recently, a growing interest has been seen in deep learning-based semantic segmentation. UNet, which is one of deep learning networks with an encoder-decoder architecture, is widely used in medical image segmentation. Combining multi-scale features is one of important factors for accurate segmentation. UNet++ was developed as a modified Unet by designing an architecture with nested and dense skip connections. However, it does not explore sufficient information from full scales and there is still a large room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel UNet 3+, which takes advantage of full-scale skip connections and deep supervisions. The full-scale skip connections incorporate low-level details with high-level semantics from feature maps in different scales; while the deep supervision learns hierarchical representations from the full-scale aggregated feature maps. The proposed method is especially benefiting for organs that appear at varying scales. In addition to accuracy improvements, the proposed UNet 3+ can reduce the network parameters to improve the computation efficiency. We further propose a hybrid loss function and devise a classification-guided module to enhance the organ boundary and reduce the over-segmentation in a non-organ image, yielding more accurate segmentation results. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on two datasets. The code is available at: github.com/ZJUGiveLab/UNet-Version.
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