TriConvUNeXt: A Pure CNN-Based Lightweight Symmetrical Network for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Biomedical image segmentation is essential in clinical practices, offering critical insights for accurate diagnosis and strategic treatment approaches. Nowadays, self-attention-based networks have achieved competitive performance in both natural language processing and computer vision, but the computational cost has reduced their popularity in practical applications. The recent study of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) explores linear functions within modified CNN layer demonstrating pure CNN-based networks can still achieve competitive results against Vision Transformer (ViT) in biomedical image segmentation, with fewer parameters. The modified CNN, i.e., Depthwise CNN, however, leaves the features cleaved off in the channel dimension and prevents the extraction of features in the perspective of channel interaction. To effectively further explore the feature learning power of modified CNN with biomedical image segmentation, we design a lightweight multi-convolutional multi-scale convolutional network block (MSConvNeXt) for U-shape symmetrical network. Specifically, a network block consisting of a depthwise CNN, a deformable CNN, and a dilated CNN is proposed to capture semantic feature information effectively while with low computational cost. Furthermore, channel shuffling operation is proposed to dynamically promote an efficient feature fusion among the feature maps. The network block hereby is properly deployed within U-shape symmetrical encoder-decoder style network, named TriConvUNeXt. The proposed network is validated on a public benchmark dataset with a comprehensive evaluation in both computational cost and segmentation performance against 13 baseline methods. Specifically, TriConvUNeXt achieves 1% higher than UNet and TransUNet in Dice-Coefficient while 81% and 97% lower in computational cost. The implementation of TriConvUNeXt is made publicly accessible via https://github.com/ziyangwang007/TriConvUNeXt .