Improved U-Net3+ with stage residual for brain tumor segmentation

Abstract Background For the encoding part of U-Net3+,the ability of brain tumor feature extraction is insufficient, as a result, the features can not be fused well during up-sampling, and the accuracy of segmentation will reduce. Methods In this study, we put forward an improved U-Net3+ segmentation network based on stage residual. In the encoder part, the encoder based on the stage residual structure is used to solve the vanishing gradient problem caused by the increasing in network depth, and enhances the feature extraction ability of the encoder which is instrumental in full feature fusion when up-sampling in the network. What’s more, we replaced batch normalization (BN) layer with filter response normalization (FRN) layer to eliminate batch size impact on the network. Based on the improved U-Net3+ two-dimensional (2D) model with stage residual, IResUnet3+ three-dimensional (3D) model is constructed. We propose appropriate methods to deal with 3D data, which achieve accurate segmentation of the 3D network. Results The experimental results showed that: the sensitivity of WT, TC, and ET increased by 1.34%, 4.6%, and 8.44%, respectively. And the Dice coefficients of ET and WT were further increased by 3.43% and 1.03%, respectively. To facilitate further research, source code can be found at: https://github.com/YuOnlyLookOne/IResUnet3Plus . Conclusion The improved network has a significant improvement in the segmentation task of the brain tumor BraTS2018 dataset, compared with the classical networks u-net, v-net, resunet and u-net3+, the proposed network has smaller parameters and significantly improved accuracy.