Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation

TL;DR

Swin-Unet introduces a pure Transformer-based U-shaped architecture for medical image segmentation, effectively capturing global context and outperforming traditional CNN-based methods on multiple tasks.

Contribution

This paper presents Swin-Unet, a novel pure Transformer architecture with hierarchical Swin Transformer modules for improved medical image segmentation.

Findings

Outperforms CNN-based and hybrid models on multi-organ segmentation

Effective global and local feature learning through hierarchical Swin Transformer

Achieves superior accuracy with 4x down-sampling and up-sampling

Abstract

In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved milestones in medical image analysis. Especially, the deep neural networks based on U-shaped architecture and skip-connections have been widely applied in a variety of medical image tasks. However, although CNN has achieved excellent performance, it cannot learn global and long-range semantic information interaction well due to the locality of the convolution operation. In this paper, we propose Swin-Unet, which is an Unet-like pure Transformer for medical image segmentation. The tokenized image patches are fed into the Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder architecture with skip-connections for local-global semantic feature learning. Specifically, we use hierarchical Swin Transformer with shifted windows as the encoder to extract context features. And a symmetric Swin Transformer-based decoder with patch expanding layer is designed to perform the up-sampling operation to restore the spatial resolution of the feature maps. Under the direct down-sampling and up-sampling of the inputs and outputs by 4x, experiments on multi-organ and cardiac segmentation tasks demonstrate that the pure Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder network outperforms those methods with full-convolution or the combination of transformer and convolution. The codes and trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/HuCaoFighting/Swin-Unet.