Papers › Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas

Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas

11 Apr 2018arXiv:1804.03999archive 2025-07-28

Ozan Oktay, Jo Schlemper, Loic Le Folgoc, Matthew Lee, Mattias Heinrich, Kazunari Misawa, Kensaku Mori, Steven McDonagh, Nils Y. Hammerla, Bernhard Kainz, Ben Glocker, Daniel Rueckert

We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.

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ozan-oktay/Attention-Gated-Networks officialmentioned in paperpytorchMIT report
Arnukk/CASPIAN mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
BboyHanat/U-Net mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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LeeJunHyun/Image_Segmentation mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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trichtu/ConvLSTM-RAU-net mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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Tasks

Brain Tumor SegmentationComputational EfficiencyImage SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationPancreas SegmentationSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Pancreas Segmentation CT-150 Att U-Net Precision 0.849 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Pancreas Segmentation CT-150 Att U-Net Recall 0.841 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Pancreas Segmentation TCIA Pancreas-CT Dataset Att U-Net Dice Score 0.831 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Concatenated Skip ConnectionConvolutionMax PoolingReLUU-Net

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