DENSE-INception U-net for medical image segmentation

Ziang Zhang, Chengdong Wu, Sonya Coleman, Dermot Kerr

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

166 Citations (Scopus)
1679 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Background and objective:
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) play an important role in the field of medical image segmentation. Among many kinds of CNNs, the U-net architecture is one of the most famous fully convolutional network architectures for medical semantic segmentation tasks. Recent work shows that the U-net network can be substantially deeper thus resulting in improved performance on segmentation tasks. Though adding more layers directly into network is a popular way to make a network deeper, it may lead to gradient vanishing or redundant computation during training.
Methods:
A novel CNN architecture is proposed that integrates the Inception-Res module and densely connecting convolutional module into the U-net architecture. The proposed network model consists of the following parts: firstly, the Inception-Res block is designed to increase the width of the network by replacing the standard convolutional layers; secondly, the Dense-Inception block is designed to extract features and make the network more deep without additional parameters; thirdly, the down-sampling block is adopted to reduce the size of feature maps to accelerate learning and the up-sampling block is used to resize the feature maps.
Results:
The proposed model is tested on images of blood vessel segmentations from retina images, the lung segmentation of CT Data from the benchmark Kaggle datasets and the MRI scan brain tumor segmentation datasets from MICCAI BraTS 2017. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide better performance on these two tasks compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. The results reach an average Dice score of 0.9857 in the lung segmentation. For the blood vessel
segmentation, the results reach an average Dice score of 0.9582. For the brain tumor segmentation, the results reach an average Dice score of 0.9867.
Conclusions:
The experiments highlighted that combining the inception module with dense connections in the U-Net architecture is a promising approach for semantic medical image segmentation.
Original languageEnglish
Article number105395
Number of pages15
JournalComputer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
Volume192
Early online date15 Feb 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished (in print/issue) - 31 Aug 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. U1713216 and the Shenyang Intelligent Robot Laboratory Fund of Chinaunder Grant 18-007-0-06.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020

Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • Deep learning
  • DenseNet
  • GoogLeNet
  • Medical image segmentation
  • U-net

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