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Dual-Branch-UNet: A Dual-Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Muwei Jian1,2,#,*, Ronghua Wu1,#, Hongyu Chen1, Lanqi Fu3, Chengdong Yang1

1 School of Information Science and Technology, Linyi University, Linyi, 276000, China
2 School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, 250014, China
3 School of Science & Engineering, University of Limerick, Limerick, V94 T9PX, Ireland

* Corresponding Author: Muwei Jian. Email: email

(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Advanced Intelligent Decision and Intelligent Control with Applications in Smart City)

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2023, 137(1), 705-716. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2023.027425

Abstract

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.

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Cite This Article

Jian, M., Wu, R., Chen, H., Fu, L., Yang, C. (2023). Dual-Branch-UNet: A Dual-Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation. CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, 137(1), 705–716.



cc This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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