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Dual-branch-UNnet: A dual-branch convolutional neural network for medical image segmentation

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posted on 2023-10-17, 15:31 authored by Muwei Jian, Ronghua WuRonghua Wu, Hongyu chenHongyu chen, Lanqi Fu, Chengdong Yang

In intelligent perception and diagnosis of medical equipment, the visual and morphological changes in retinal vessels are closely related to the severity of cardiovascular diseases (e.g., diabetes and hypertension). Intelligent auxiliary diagnosis of these diseases depends on the accuracy of the retinal vascular segmentation results. To address this challenge, we design a Dual-Branch-UNet framework, which comprises a Dual-Branch encoder structure for feature extraction based on the traditional U-Net model for medical image segmentation. To be more explicit, we utilize a novel parallel encoder made up of various convolutional modules to enhance the encoder portion of the original U-Net. Then, image features are combined at each layer to produce richer semantic data and the model’s capacity is adjusted to various input images. Meanwhile, in the lower sampling section, we give up pooling and conduct the lower sampling by convolution operation to control step size for information fusion. We also employ an attention module in the decoder stage to filter the image noises so as to lessen the response of irrelevant features. Experiments are verified and compared on the DRIVE and ARIA datasets for retinal vessels segmentation. The proposed Dual-Branch-UNet has proved to be superior to other five typical state-of-the-art methods.

History

Publication

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 137(1), pp. 705-716

Publisher

Tech Science Press

Other Funding information

National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (61976123, 62072213); Taishan Young Scholars Program of Shandong Province; and Key Development Program for Basic Research of Shandong Province (ZR2020ZD44)

Department or School

  • School of Engineering

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