# V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2,292 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 2292)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08023/) (2022)
- [Medical Transformer: Gated Axial-Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10662/) (2021)
- [VM-UNet: Vision Mamba UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02491/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07804/) (2022)
- [TransBTS: Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04430/) (2021)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [Transformers in Medical Imaging: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09873/) (2022)
- [SynthSeg: Segmentation of brain MRI scans of any contrast and resolution without retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09559/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12306/) (2023)
- [K-Net: Towards Unified Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14855/) (2021)
- [Decoupling Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07910/) (2021)
- [UCTransNet: Rethinking the Skip Connections in U-Net from a Channel-wise Perspective with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04335/) (2021)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Segmentation Review: The success of U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14830/) (2022)
- [UNeXt: MLP-based Rapid Medical Image Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04967/) (2022)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been recently employed to solve problems from both the computer vision and medical image analysis fields. Despite their popularity, most approaches are only able to process 2D images while most medical data used in clinical practice consists of 3D volumes. In this work we propose an approach to 3D image segmentation based on a volumetric, fully convolutional, neural network. Our CNN is trained end-to-end on MRI volumes depicting prostate, and learns to predict segmentation for the whole volume at once. We introduce a novel objective function, that we optimise during training, based on Dice coefficient. In this way we can deal with situations where there is a strong imbalance between the number of foreground and background voxels. To cope with the limited number of annotated volumes available for training, we augment the data applying random non-linear transformations and histogram matching. We show in our experimental evaluation that our approach achieves good performances on challenging test data while requiring only a fraction of the processing time needed by other previous methods.