Half-UNet: A Simplified U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in computer-aided diagnosis procedures. Recently, U-Net is widely used in medical image segmentation. Many variants of U-Net have been proposed, which attempt to improve the network performance while keeping the U-shaped structure unchanged. However, this U-shaped structure is not necessarily optimal. In this article, the effects of different parts of the U-Net on the segmentation ability are experimentally analyzed. Then a more efficient architecture, Half-UNet, is proposed. The proposed architecture is essentially an encoder-decoder network based on the U-Net structure, in which both the encoder and decoder are simplified. The re-designed architecture takes advantage of the unification of channel numbers, full-scale feature fusion, and Ghost modules. We compared Half-UNet with U-Net and its variants across multiple medical image segmentation tasks: mammography segmentation, lung nodule segmentation in the CT images, and left ventricular MRI image segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that Half-UNet has similar segmentation accuracy compared U-Net and its variants, while the parameters and floating-point operations are reduced by 98.6 and 81.8%, respectively, compared with U-Net.