Next-Gen Medical Imaging: U-Net Evolution and the Rise of Transformers

The advancement of medical imaging has profoundly impacted our understanding of the human body and various diseases. It has led to the continuous refinement of related technologies over many years. Despite these advancements, several challenges persist in the development of medical imaging, including data shortages characterized by low contrast, high noise levels, and limited image resolution. The U-Net architecture has significantly evolved to address these challenges, becoming a staple in medical imaging due to its effective performance and numerous updated versions. However, the emergence of Transformer-based models marks a new era in deep learning for medical imaging. These models and their variants promise substantial progress, necessitating a comparative analysis to comprehend recent advancements. This review begins by exploring the fundamental U-Net architecture and its variants, then examines the limitations encountered during its evolution. It then introduces the Transformer-based self-attention mechanism and investigates how modern models incorporate positional information. The review emphasizes the revolutionary potential of Transformer-based techniques, discusses their limitations, and outlines potential avenues for future research.