Fast-MedNeXt: Accelerating the MedNeXt Architecture to Improve Brain Tumour Segmentation Efficiency

With the rapid development of medical imaging technology, 3D image segmentation technology has gradually become a mainstream method, especially in brain tumour detection and diagnosis showing its unique advantages. The technique makes full use of 3D spatial information to locate and analyze tumours more accurately, thus playing an important role in improving diagnostic accuracy, optimising treatment planning and promoting research. However, it also suffers from significant computational expenditure and delayed processing pace. In this paper, we propose an innovative optimisation scheme to address this problem. We thoroughly investigate the MedNeXt network and propose Fast-MedNeXt, which aims to increase the processing speed while maintaining accuracy. First, we introduce the partial convolution (PConv) technique, which replaces the deep convolutional layers in the network. This improvement effectively reduces computation and memory requirements while maintaining efficient feature extraction. Second, based on PConv, we propose PConv-Down and PConv-Up modules, which are applied to the up-sampling and down-sampling modules to further optimise the network structure and improve efficiency. To confirm the efficacy of the approach, we carried out a sequence of tests in the multimodal brain tumour segmentation challenge 2021 (BraTS2021). By comparing with the MedNeXt series network, the Fast-MedNeXt reduced the latency by 22.1%, 20.5%, 15.8%, and 11.4% respectively, while the average accuracy also increased by 0.475% and 0.2% respectively. These significant performance improvements demonstrate the effectiveness of Fast-MedNeXt in 3D medical image segmentation tasks and provide a new and more efficient solution for the field.