Mu-Net:Multi-Path Upsampling Convolution Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation plays an important role in clinical diagnosis,quantitative analysis,and treatment process.Since 2015,U-Net-based approaches have been widely used formedical image segmentation.The purpose of the U-Net expansive path is to map low-resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps.However,the consecutive deconvolution and convolutional operations in the expansive path lead to the loss of some high-level information.More high-level information can make the segmentationmore accurate.In this paper,we propose MU-Net,a novel,multi-path upsampling convolution network to retain more high-level information.The MU-Net mainly consists of three parts:contracting path,skip connection,and multi-expansive paths.The proposed MU-Net architecture is evaluated based on three different medical imaging datasets.Our experiments show that MU-Net improves the segmentation performance of U-Net-based methods on different datasets.At the same time,the computational efficiency is significantly improved by reducing the number of parameters by more than half.