No Arabic abstract
Batch Normalization (BN) is one of the key components for accelerating network training, and has been widely adopted in the medical image analysis field. However, BN only calculates the global statistics at the batch level, and applies the same affine transformation uniformly across all spatial coordinates, which would suppress the image contrast of different semantic structures. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the semantic class information into normalization layers, so that the activations corresponding to different regions (i.e., classes) can be modulated differently. We thus develop a novel DualNorm-UNet, to concurrently incorporate both global image-level statistics and local region-wise statistics for network normalization. Specifically, the local statistics are integrated by adaptively modulating the activations along different class regions via the learned semantic masks in the normalization layer. Compared with existing methods, our approach exploits semantic knowledge at normalization and yields more discriminative features for robust segmentation results. More importantly, our network demonstrates superior abilities in capturing domain-invariant information from multiple domains (institutions) of medical data. Extensive experiments show that our proposed DualNorm-UNet consistently improves the performance on various segmentation tasks, even in the face of more complex and variable data distributions. Code is available at https://github.com/lambert-x/DualNorm-Unet.
In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved milestones in medical image analysis. Especially, the deep neural networks based on U-shaped architecture and skip-connections have been widely applied in a variety of medical image tasks. However, although CNN has achieved excellent performance, it cannot learn global and long-range semantic information interaction well due to the locality of the convolution operation. In this paper, we propose Swin-Unet, which is an Unet-like pure Transformer for medical image segmentation. The tokenized image patches are fed into the Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder architecture with skip-connections for local-global semantic feature learning. Specifically, we use hierarchical Swin Transformer with shifted windows as the encoder to extract context features. And a symmetric Swin Transformer-based decoder with patch expanding layer is designed to perform the up-sampling operation to restore the spatial resolution of the feature maps. Under the direct down-sampling and up-sampling of the inputs and outputs by 4x, experiments on multi-organ and cardiac segmentation tasks demonstrate that the pure Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder network outperforms those methods with full-convolution or the combination of transformer and convolution. The codes and trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/HuCaoFighting/Swin-Unet.
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
The performance of deep segmentation models often degrades due to distribution shifts in image intensities between the training and test data sets. This is particularly pronounced in multi-centre studies involving data acquired using multi-vendor scanners, with variations in acquisition protocols. It is challenging to address this degradation because the shift is often not known textit{a priori} and hence difficult to model. We propose a novel framework to ensure robust segmentation in the presence of such distribution shifts. Our contribution is three-fold. First, inspired by the spirit of curriculum learning, we design a novel style curriculum to train the segmentation models using an easy-to-hard mode. A style transfer model with style fusion is employed to generate the curriculum samples. Gradually focusing on complex and adversarial style samples can significantly boost the robustness of the models. Second, instead of subjectively defining the curriculum complexity, we adopt an automated gradient manipulation method to control the hard and adversarial sample generation process. Third, we propose the Local Gradient Sign strategy to aggregate the gradient locally and stabilise training during gradient manipulation. The proposed framework can generalise to unknown distribution without using any target data. Extensive experiments on the public M&Ms Challenge dataset demonstrate that our proposed framework can generalise deep models well to unknown distributions and achieve significant improvements in segmentation accuracy.
Deep learning has successfully been leveraged for medical image segmentation. It employs convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn distinctive image features from a defined pixel-wise objective function. However, this approach can lead to less output pixel interdependence producing incomplete and unrealistic segmentation results. In this paper, we present a fully automatic deep learning method for robust medical image segmentation by formulating the segmentation problem as a recurrent framework using two systems. The first one is a forward system of an encoder-decoder CNN that predicts the segmentation result from the input image. The predicted probabilistic output of the forward system is then encoded by a fully convolutional network (FCN)-based context feedback system. The encoded feature space of the FCN is then integrated back into the forward systems feed-forward learning process. Using the FCN-based context feedback loop allows the forward system to learn and extract more high-level image features and fix previous mistakes, thereby improving prediction accuracy over time. Experimental results, performed on four different clinical datasets, demonstrate our methods potential application for single and multi-structure medical image segmentation by outperforming the state of the art methods. With the feedback loop, deep learning methods can now produce results that are both anatomically plausible and robust to low contrast images. Therefore, formulating image segmentation as a recurrent framework of two interconnected networks via context feedback loop can be a potential method for robust and efficient medical image analysis.
Object segmentation plays an important role in the modern medical image analysis, which benefits clinical study, disease diagnosis, and surgery planning. Given the various modalities of medical images, the automated or semi-automated segmentation approaches have been used to identify and parse organs, bones, tumors, and other regions-of-interest (ROI). However, these contemporary segmentation approaches tend to fail to predict the boundary areas of ROI, because of the fuzzy appearance contrast caused during the imaging procedure. To further improve the segmentation quality of boundary areas, we propose a boundary enhancement loss to enforce additional constraints on optimizing machine learning models. The proposed loss function is light-weighted and easy to implement without any pre- or post-processing. Our experimental results validate that our loss function are better than, or at least comparable to, other state-of-the-art loss functions in terms of segmentation accuracy.