DC-UNet: Rethinking the U-Net Architecture with Dual Channel Efficient CNN for Medical Images Segmentation

Abstract

Recently, deep learning has become much more popular in computer vision area. The Convolution Neural Network (CNN) has brought a breakthrough in images segmentation areas, especially, for medical images. In this regard, U-Net is the predominant approach to medical image segmentation task. The U-Net not only performs well in segmenting multimodal medical images generally, but also in some tough cases of them. However, we found that the classical U-Net architecture has limitation in several aspects. Therefore, we applied modifications: 1) designed efficient CNN architecture to replace encoder and decoder, 2) applied residual module to replace skip connection between encoder and decoder to improve based on the-state-of-the-art U-Net model. Following these modifications, we designed a novel architecture--DC-UNet, as a potential successor to the U-Net architecture. We created a new effective CNN architecture and build the DC-UNet based on this CNN. We have evaluated our model on three datasets with tough cases and have obtained a relative improvement in performance of 2.90%, 1.49% and 11.42% respectively compared with classical U-Net. In addition, we used the Tanimoto similarity to replace the Jaccard similarity for gray-to-gray image comparisons.