{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/narrowing-the-semantic-gaps-in-u-net-with","title":"Narrowing the semantic gaps in U-Net with learnable skip connections: The case of medical image segmentation","arxiv_id":"2312.15182","date":"2023-12-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Haonan Wang","Peng Cao","Xiaoli Liu","Jinzhu Yang","Osmar Zaiane"],"abstract":"Most state-of-the-art methods for medical image segmentation adopt the encoder-decoder architecture. However, this U-shaped framework still has limitations in capturing the non-local multi-scale information with a simple skip connection. To solve the problem, we firstly explore the potential weakness of skip connections in U-Net on multiple segmentation tasks, and find that i) not all skip connections are useful, each skip connection has different contribution; ii) the optimal combinations of skip connections are different, relying on the specific datasets. Based on our findings, we propose a new segmentation framework, named UDTransNet, to solve three semantic gaps in U-Net. Specifically, we propose a Dual Attention Transformer (DAT) module for capturing the channel- and spatial-wise relationships to better fuse the encoder features, and a Decoder-guided Recalibration Attention (DRA) module for effectively connecting the DAT tokens and the decoder features to eliminate the inconsistency. Hence, both modules establish a learnable connection to solve the semantic gaps between the encoder and the decoder, which leads to a high-performance segmentation model for medical images. Comprehensive experimental results indicate that our UDTransNet produces higher evaluation scores and finer segmentation results with relatively fewer parameters over the state-of-the-art segmentation methods on different public datasets. Code: https://github.com/McGregorWwww/UDTransNet.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15182v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.15182v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"narrowing-the-semantic-gaps-in-u-net-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/McGregorWwww/UDTransNet","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"narrowing-the-semantic-gaps-in-u-net-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/mcgregorwwww/uctransnet","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"narrowing-the-semantic-gaps-in-u-net-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/FaceOnLive/Realtime-Background-Changer-SDK-Android","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"medical-image-segmentation","task_name":"Medical Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"concatenated-skip-connection","method_name":"Concatenated Skip Connection"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"},{"method_slug":"u-net","method_name":"U-Net"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2312.15182","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}