MFLUnet: multi-scale fusion lightweight Unet for medical image segmentation

Recently, the use of point-of-care medical devices has been increasing; however, many Unet and its latest variant networks have numerous parameters, high computational complexity, and slow inference speed, making them unsuitable for deployment on these point-of-care or mobile devices. In order to deploy in the real medical environment, we propose a multi-scale fusion lightweight network (MFLUnet), a CNN-based lightweight medical image segmentation model. For the information extraction ability and utilization efficiency of the network, we propose two modules, MSBDCB and EF module, which enable the model to effectively extract local features and global features and integrate multi-scale and multi-stage information while maintaining low computational complexity. The proposed network is validated on three challenging medical image segmentation tasks: skin lesion segmentation, cell segmentation, and ultrasound image segmentation. The experimental results show that our network has excellent performance without occupying almost any computing resources. Ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed encoder-decoder and skip connection module. This study introduces a new method for medical image segmentation and promotes the application of medical image segmentation networks in real medical environments.