LIT-Unet: a lightweight and effective model for medical image segmentation

This study aimed to design a simple and efficient automatic segmentation model for medical images, so as to facilitate doctors to make more accurate diagnosis and treatment plan. A hybrid lightweight network LIT-Unet with symmetric encoder–decoder U-shaped architecture is proposed. Synapse multi-organ segmentation dataset and automated cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC) dataset were used to test the segmentation performance of the method. Two indexes, Dice similarity coefficient (DSC ↑) and 95% Hausdorff distance (HD95 ↓), were used to evaluate and compare the segmentation ability with the current advanced methods. Ablation experiments were conducted to demonstrate the lightweight nature and effectiveness of our model. For Synapse dataset, our model achieves a higher DSC score (80.40%), an improvement of 3.8% over the typical hybrid model (TransUnet). The 95 HD value is low at 20.67%. For ACDC dataset, LIT-Unet achieves the optimal average DSC (%) of 91.84 compared with other networks listed. Compared to patch expanding, the DSC of our model is intuitively improved by 1.62% with the help of deformable token merging (DTM). These results show that the proposed hierarchical LIT-Unet can achieve significant accuracy and is expected to provide a reliable basis for clinical diagnosis and treatment.