FSC-UNet: a lightweight medical image segmentation algorithm fused with skip connections

Abstract

In order to study the effect of skip connections to segmentation performance in encoder and decoder networks, in this paper, we improve the skip connections of U-Net model and adopt the method of sub-module fusion connection. We fuse the high and low layers of the encoder by multi-head attention. Fusion is performed separately, and the fusion result is connected to the decoder. Considering that different input images have different effects to model training due to factors such as noise, we set the threshold by calculating the Euclidean distance between the image and the mask during training, so that different images use different skip connection methods. Experiments on Cell nuclei, Synapse, Heart, Chaos datasets show that FSC-UNet algorithm this paper proposed has better results than existing algorithms.