HyperSegNAS: Bridging One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with 3D Medical Image Segmentation using HyperNet

Semantic segmentation of 3D medical images is a challenging task due to the high variability of the shape and pattern of objects (such as organs or tumors). Given the recent success of deep learning in medical image segmentation, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been introduced to find high-performance 3D segmentation network architectures. However, because of the massive computational requirements of 3D data and the discrete optimization nature of architecture search, previous NAS methods require a long search time or necessary continuous relaxation, and commonly lead to sub-optimal network architectures. While one-shot NAS can potentially address these disadvantages, its application in the segmentation domain has not been well studied in the expansive multi-scale multi-path search space. To enable one-shot NAS for medical image segmentation, our method, named HyperSegNAS, introduces a HyperNet to assist super-net training by incorporating architecture topology information. Such a HyperNet can be removed once the super-net is trained and introduces no overhead during architecture search. We show that HyperSegNAS yields better performing and more intuitive architectures compared to the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) segmentation networks; furthermore, it can quickly and accurately find good architecture candidates under different computing constraints. Our method is evaluated on public datasets from the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) challenge, and achieves SOTA performances.