UltraLight VM-UNet: Parallel Vision Mamba Significantly Reduces Parameters for Skin Lesion Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces UltraLight VM-UNet, a lightweight skin lesion segmentation model based on Vision Mamba, achieving high performance with significantly fewer parameters suitable for mobile medical devices.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel parallel processing method called PVM Layer for Vision Mamba, reducing parameters while maintaining performance, and explores parameter influence for future lightweight model design.

Findings

Achieves comparable performance with only 0.049M parameters.

Uses GFLOPs of 0.060, demonstrating low computational load.

Outperforms several lightweight models on skin lesion datasets.

Abstract

Traditionally for improving the segmentation performance of models, most approaches prefer to use adding more complex modules. And this is not suitable for the medical field, especially for mobile medical devices, where computationally loaded models are not suitable for real clinical environments due to computational resource constraints. Recently, state-space models (SSMs), represented by Mamba, have become a strong competitor to traditional CNNs and Transformers. In this paper, we deeply explore the key elements of parameter influence in Mamba and propose an UltraLight Vision Mamba UNet (UltraLight VM-UNet) based on this. Specifically, we propose a method for processing features in parallel Vision Mamba, named PVM Layer, which achieves excellent performance with the lowest computational load while keeping the overall number of processing channels constant. We conducted comparisons and ablation experiments with several state-of-the-art lightweight models on three skin lesion public datasets and demonstrated that the UltraLight VM-UNet exhibits the same strong performance competitiveness with parameters of only 0.049M and GFLOPs of 0.060. In addition, this study deeply explores the key elements of parameter influence in Mamba, which will lay a theoretical foundation for Mamba to possibly become a new mainstream module for lightweighting in the future. The code is available from https://github.com/wurenkai/UltraLight-VM-UNet .