R2AU-Net: Attention Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network for Multimodal Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

In recent years, semantic segmentation method based on deep learning provides advanced performance in medical image segmentation. As one of the typical segmentation networks, U-Net is successfully applied to multimodal medical image segmentation. A recurrent residual convolutional neural network with attention gate connection (R2AU-Net) based on U-Net is proposed in this paper. It enhances the capability of integrating contextual information by replacing basic convolutional units in U-Net by recurrent residual convolutional units. Furthermore, R2AU-Net adopts attention gates instead of the original skip connection. In this paper, the experiments are performed on three multimodal datasets: ISIC 2018, DRIVE, and public dataset used in LUNA and the Kaggle Data Science Bowl 2017. Experimental results show that R2AU-Net achieves much better performance than other improved U-Net algorithms for multimodal medical image segmentation.