Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation

12 May 2021  ·  Hu Cao, Yueyue Wang, Joy Chen, Dongsheng Jiang, Xiaopeng Zhang, Qi Tian, Manning Wang ·

In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved milestones in medical image analysis. Especially, the deep neural networks based on U-shaped architecture and skip-connections have been widely applied in a variety of medical image tasks. However, although CNN has achieved excellent performance, it cannot learn global and long-range semantic information interaction well due to the locality of the convolution operation. In this paper, we propose Swin-Unet, which is an Unet-like pure Transformer for medical image segmentation. The tokenized image patches are fed into the Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder architecture with skip-connections for local-global semantic feature learning. Specifically, we use hierarchical Swin Transformer with shifted windows as the encoder to extract context features. And a symmetric Swin Transformer-based decoder with patch expanding layer is designed to perform the up-sampling operation to restore the spatial resolution of the feature maps. Under the direct down-sampling and up-sampling of the inputs and outputs by 4x, experiments on multi-organ and cardiac segmentation tasks demonstrate that the pure Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder network outperforms those methods with full-convolution or the combination of transformer and convolution. The codes and trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/HuCaoFighting/Swin-Unet.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Medical Image Segmentation ACDC Swin UNet Dice Score 0.9 # 3
Medical Image Segmentation Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) SwinUnet Avg DSC 90.00 # 10
Medical Image Segmentation Synapse multi-organ CT SwinUnet Avg DSC 79.13 # 12
Avg HD 21.55 # 8

Methods