A deep fully residual convolutional neural network for segmentation in EM images

In standard U-net, researchers only use long skip connections to skip features from the encoding path to the decoding path in order to recover spatial information loss during downsampling. However, it would result in gradient vanishing and limit the depth of the network. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep fully residual convolutional neural network that combines the U-net with the ResNet for medical image segmentation. By applying short skip connections, this new extension of U-net decreases the amount of parameters compared to the standard U-net, although the depth of the layer is increased. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model and other state-of-the-art models on the Electron Microscopy (EM) images dataset and the Computed Tomography (CT) images dataset. The result shows that our model achieves competitive accuracy on the EM benchmark without any further post-process. Moreover, the performance of image segmentation on CT images of the lungs is improved in contrast to the standard U-net.