FCRB U-Net: A novel fully connected residual block U-Net for fetal cerebellum ultrasound image segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel U-Net with fully connected residual blocks (FCRB U-Net) for the fetal cerebellum Ultrasound image segmentation task. FCRB U-Net, an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) based on U-Net, replaces the double convolution operation in the original model with the fully connected residual block and embeds an effective channel attention module to enhance the extraction of valid features. Moreover, in the decoding stage, a feature reuse module is employed to form a fully connected decoder to make full use of deep features. FCRB U-Net can effectively alleviate the problem of the loss of feature information during the convolution process and improve segmentation accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective and promising in the field of fetal cerebellar segmentation in actual Ultrasound images. The average IoU value and mean Dice index reach 86.72% and 90.45%, respectively, which are 3.07% and 5.25% higher than that of the basic U-Net.