Papers › nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation

nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation

27 Sep 2018arXiv:1809.10486archive 2025-07-28

Fabian Isensee, Jens Petersen, Andre Klein, David Zimmerer, Paul F. Jaeger, Simon Kohl, Jakob Wasserthal, Gregor Koehler, Tobias Norajitra, Sebastian Wirkert, Klaus H. Maier-Hein

The U-Net was presented in 2015. With its straight-forward and successful architecture it quickly evolved to a commonly used benchmark in medical image segmentation. The adaptation of the U-Net to novel problems, however, comprises several degrees of freedom regarding the exact architecture, preprocessing, training and inference. These choices are not independent of each other and substantially impact the overall performance. The present paper introduces the nnU-Net ('no-new-Net'), which refers to a robust and self-adapting framework on the basis of 2D and 3D vanilla U-Nets. We argue the strong case for taking away superfluous bells and whistles of many proposed network designs and instead focus on the remaining aspects that make out the performance and generalizability of a method. We evaluate the nnU-Net in the context of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon challenge, which measures segmentation performance in ten disciplines comprising distinct entities, image modalities, image geometries and dataset sizes, with no manual adjustments between datasets allowed. At the time of manuscript submission, nnU-Net achieves the highest mean dice scores across all classes and seven phase 1 tasks (except class 1 in BrainTumour) in the online leaderboard of the challenge.

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MIC-DKFZ/nnunet officialpytorchApache-2.0 report
gift-surg/MONAIfbs mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
justld/nnunet_paddle mentioned on GitHubpaddleApache-2.0 report

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jaccard justld/nnunet_paddle/nnunet_tools/metrics.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 12b5ba241c136bb3 · report
precision justld/nnunet_paddle/nnunet_tools/metrics.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 035dc40fdafe0275 · report
run_evaluation justld/nnunet_paddle/nnunet_tools/evaluator.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e7033836f7ce1958 · report
create_data_list_of_dictionaries gift-surg/MONAIfbs/monaifbs/src/inference/monai_dynunet_inference.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e02a343b07f81c0a · report
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Tasks

Image SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationSegmentationSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Medical Image Segmentation Medical Segmentation Decathlon nnUNet Dice (Average) 77.89 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Segmentation Medical Segmentation Decathlon nnUNet NSD 88.09 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Segmentation Synapse multi-organ CT nnUNet Avg DSC 88.80 #4 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Segmentation Synapse multi-organ CT nnUNet Avg HD 10.78 #4 of 23 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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