A lightweight segmentation method based on residual U-Net for MR images

Automatic segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which bases on Residual U-Net (ResU-Net), helps radiologists to quickly assess the condition. However, the ResU-Net structure requires a large number of parameters and storage model space. It is not convenient to apply to mobile MRI device. To solve this problem, Depthwise Separable Convolution and Squeeze-and-Excitation Residual U-Networks (DSRU-Net) is proposed to segment MRI. Squeeze-and-Excitation method is a channel attention mechanism. The proposed method is conducive to simplify ResU-Net model, making ResU-Net more convenient to be applied to mobile MRI device. The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, which includes three evaluation factors are that the required parameters of the model, the value of Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), and the value of Hausdorff Distance (HD), is used to evaluate the test results of the proposed method on the MICCAI 2012 Prostate MR Image Segmentation (PROMISE12) challenge dataset and Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) dataset. The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation values obtained by the proposed method in 5 PROMISE12 samples and 15 ACDC samples are 0.9889 and 0.9652, respectively. Combining the average results of the two datasets, the proposed method has the best effect in balancing the accuracy of segmentation and the amount of model parameters.