FuseUNet: A Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Method for U-like Networks

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: He, Quansong, Min, Xiangde, Wang, Kaishen, He, Tao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915570918621184
author He, Quansong
Min, Xiangde
Wang, Kaishen
He, Tao
author_facet He, Quansong
Min, Xiangde
Wang, Kaishen
He, Tao
contents Medical image segmentation is a critical task in computer vision, with UNet serving as a milestone architecture. The typical component of UNet family is the skip connection, however, their skip connections face two significant limitations: (1) they lack effective interaction between features at different scales, and (2) they rely on simple concatenation or addition operations, which constrain efficient information integration. While recent improvements to UNet have focused on enhancing encoder and decoder capabilities, these limitations remain overlooked. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel multi-scale feature fusion method that reimagines the UNet decoding process as solving an initial value problem (IVP), treating skip connections as discrete nodes. By leveraging principles from the linear multistep method, we propose an adaptive ordinary differential equation method to enable effective multi-scale feature fusion. Our approach is independent of the encoder and decoder architectures, making it adaptable to various U-Net-like networks. Experiments on ACDC, KiTS2023, MSD brain tumor, and ISIC2017/2018 skin lesion segmentation datasets demonstrate improved feature utilization, reduced network parameters, and maintained high performance. The code is available at https://github.com/nayutayuki/FuseUNet.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05821
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FuseUNet: A Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Method for U-like Networks
He, Quansong
Min, Xiangde
Wang, Kaishen
He, Tao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Medical image segmentation is a critical task in computer vision, with UNet serving as a milestone architecture. The typical component of UNet family is the skip connection, however, their skip connections face two significant limitations: (1) they lack effective interaction between features at different scales, and (2) they rely on simple concatenation or addition operations, which constrain efficient information integration. While recent improvements to UNet have focused on enhancing encoder and decoder capabilities, these limitations remain overlooked. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel multi-scale feature fusion method that reimagines the UNet decoding process as solving an initial value problem (IVP), treating skip connections as discrete nodes. By leveraging principles from the linear multistep method, we propose an adaptive ordinary differential equation method to enable effective multi-scale feature fusion. Our approach is independent of the encoder and decoder architectures, making it adaptable to various U-Net-like networks. Experiments on ACDC, KiTS2023, MSD brain tumor, and ISIC2017/2018 skin lesion segmentation datasets demonstrate improved feature utilization, reduced network parameters, and maintained high performance. The code is available at https://github.com/nayutayuki/FuseUNet.
title FuseUNet: A Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Method for U-like Networks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05821