LATUP-Net: A Lightweight 3D Attention U-Net with Parallel Convolutions for Brain Tumor Segmentation

TL;DR

LATUP-Net is a lightweight 3D attention U-Net with parallel convolutions that achieves high brain tumor segmentation accuracy while significantly reducing computational requirements, making it suitable for resource-limited clinical settings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lightweight architecture combining parallel convolutions and attention mechanisms for efficient 3D brain tumor segmentation.

Findings

Achieves high Dice scores on BraTS datasets.

Uses only 3.07 million parameters, 59 times fewer than state-of-the-art models.

Operates efficiently on a single GPU with 15.79 GFLOPs.

Abstract

Early-stage 3D brain tumor segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans is crucial for prompt and effective treatment. However, this process faces the challenge of precise delineation due to the tumors' complex heterogeneity. Moreover, energy sustainability targets and resource limitations, especially in developing countries, require efficient and accessible medical imaging solutions. The proposed architecture, a Lightweight 3D ATtention U-Net with Parallel convolutions, LATUP-Net, addresses these issues. It is specifically designed to reduce computational requirements significantly while maintaining high segmentation performance. By incorporating parallel convolutions, it enhances feature representation by capturing multi-scale information. It further integrates an attention mechanism to refine segmentation through selective feature recalibration. LATUP-Net achieves promising segmentation performance: the average Dice scores for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor on the BraTS 2020 dataset are 88.41%, 83.82%, and 73.67%, and on the BraTS 2021 dataset, they are 90.29%, 89.54%, and 83.92%, respectively. Hausdorff distance metrics further indicate its improved ability to delineate tumor boundaries. With its significantly reduced computational demand using only 3.07M parameters, about 59 times fewer than other state-of-the-art models, and running on a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX3060 12GB GPU, LATUP-Net requires just 15.79 GFLOPs. This makes it a promising solution for real-world clinical applications, particularly in settings with limited resources. Investigations into the model's interpretability, utilizing gradient-weighted class activation mapping and confusion matrices, reveal that while attention mechanisms enhance the segmentation of small regions, their impact is nuanced. Achieving the most [...]. The code is available at https://qyber.black/ca/code-bca.