[Cardiac magnetic resonance image segmentation based on lightweight network and knowledge distillation strategy]

To address the issue of a large number of network parameters and substantial floating-point operations in deep learning networks applied to image segmentation for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), this paper proposes a lightweight dilated parallel convolution U-Net (DPU-Net) to decrease the quantity of network parameters and the number of floating-point operations. Additionally, a multi-scale adaptation vector knowledge distillation (MAVKD) training strategy is employed to extract latent knowledge from the teacher network, thereby enhancing the segmentation accuracy of DPU-Net. The proposed network adopts a distinctive way of convolutional channel variation to reduce the number of parameters and combines with residual blocks and dilated convolutions to alleviate the gradient explosion problem and spatial information loss that might be caused by the reduction of parameters. The research findings indicate that this network has achieved considerable improvements in reducing the number of parameters and enhancing the efficiency of floating-point operations. When applying this network to the public dataset of the automatic cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC), the dice coefficient reaches 91.26%. The research results validate the effectiveness of the proposed lightweight network and knowledge distillation strategy, providing a reliable lightweighting idea for deep learning in the field of medical image segmentation.