Abstract: In recent years, Transformer models have addressed the limitations of deep neural networks in traditional medical image segmentation. However, they still underperform in segmentation at the edges of medical images and suffer from large number of parameters and computational complexity, making them unsuitable for mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a lightweight network called ECG-UNet to mitigate these issues. Firstly, the model uses a strategy combining linear mapping and attention instead of conventional convolution at the bottleneck to reduce the number of network parameters while maintaining performance. Meanwhile, we introduce a lightweight multilayer perceptron module to learn more location information of the image. Secondly, dilated convolutions are applied to expand the respective field. Finally, in exchange for further improvement of the model performance at a relatively small computational cost, a gate attention mechanism is added in the skip connections to enhance the feature propagation in the network. The model is validated on the BUSI and ISIC2018 datasets. The results show that the proposed network structure greatly reduces the computational costs while achieving superior segmentation performance compared to current mainstream algorithms.

Key words: medical image segmentation, neural network, lightweight, gated attention