A network lightweighting method for difficult segmentation of 3D medical images

【摘要】 Currently,deep learning is widely used in medical image segmentation and has achieved good results.However,3D medical image segmentation tasks with diverse lesion characters,blurred edges,and unstable positions require complex networks with a large number of parameters.It is computationally expensive and results in high requirements on equipment,making it hard to deploy the network in hospitals.In this work,we propose a method for network lightweighting and applied it to a 3D CNN based network.We experimented on a COVID-19 lesion segmentation dataset.Specifically,we use three cascaded one-dimensional convolutions to replace a 3D convolution,and integrate instance normalization with the previous layer of one-dimensional convolutions to accelerate network inference.In addition,we simplify test-time augmentation and deep supervision of the network.Experiments show that the lightweight network can reduce the prediction time of each sample and the memory usage by 50% and reduce the number of parameters by 60% compared with the original network.The training time of one epoch is also reduced by 50% with the segmentation accuracy dropped within the acceptable range.更多还原

【Abstract】 Currently,deep learning is widely used in medical image segmentation and has achieved good results.However,3D medical image segmentation tasks with diverse lesion characters,blurred edges,and unstable positions require complex networks with a large number of parameters.It is computationally expensive and results in high requirements on equipment,making it hard to deploy the network in hospitals.In this work,we propose a method for network lightweighting and applied it to a 3D CNN based network.We experimented on a COVID-19 lesion segmentation dataset.Specifically,we use three cascaded one-dimensional convolutions to replace a 3D convolution,and integrate instance normalization with the previous layer of one-dimensional convolutions to accelerate network inference.In addition,we simplify test-time augmentation and deep supervision of the network.Experiments show that the lightweight network can reduce the prediction time of each sample and the memory usage by 50% and reduce the number of parameters by 60% compared with the original network.The training time of one epoch is also reduced by 50% with the segmentation accuracy dropped within the acceptable range.更多还原