Recurrent residual U-net with efficientnet encoder for medical image segmentation

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

4-12-2021

Department

Department of Applied Computing

Abstract

In recent years, deep learning for health care is rapidly infiltrating and transforming medical fields thanks to the advances in computing power, data availability, and algorithm development. In particular, U-Net, a deep learning technique, has achieved remarkable success in medical image segmentation and has become one of the premier tools in this area. While the accomplishments of U-Net and other deep learning algorithms are evident, there still exist many challenges in medical image processing to achieve human-like performance. In this paper, we propose a U-net architecture that integrates a residual skip connections and recurrent feedback with EfficientNet as a pretrained encoder. Residual connections help feature propagation in deep neural networks and significantly improve performance against networks with a similar number of parameters while recurrent connections ameliorate gradient learning. We also propose a second model that utilizes densely connected layers aiding deeper neural networks. EfficientNet is a family of powerful pretrained encoders that streamline neural network design. The use of EfficientNet as an encoder provides the network with robust feature extraction that can be used by the U-Net decoder to create highly accurate segmentation maps. The proposed networks are evaluated against state-of-the-art deep learning based segmentation techniques to demonstrate their superior performance.

Publication Title

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

ISBN

9781510643079

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