# Lightweight Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Foot Ulcer Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Large Batch Optimization for Deep Learning: Training BERT in 76 minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00962/) (2019)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [Fully Automatic Wound Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05855/) (2020)
- [FUSeg: The Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00414/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Improving Limited Supervised Foot Ulcer Segmentation Using Cross-Domain Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08422/) (2024)
- [Towards Efficient and Accurate CT Segmentation via Edge-Preserving Probabilistic Downsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03991/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continuous monitoring of foot ulcer healing is needed to ensure the efficacy of a given treatment and to avoid any possibility of deterioration. Foot ulcer segmentation is an essential step in wound diagnosis. We developed a model that is similar in spirit to the well-established encoder-decoder and residual convolution neural networks. Our model includes a residual connection along with a channel and spatial attention integrated within each convolution block. A simple patch-based approach for model training, test time augmentations, and majority voting on the obtained predictions resulted in superior performance. Our model did not leverage any readily available backbone architecture, pre-training on a similar external dataset, or any of the transfer learning techniques. The total number of network parameters being around 5 million made it a significantly lightweight model as compared with the available state-of-the-art models used for the foot ulcer segmentation task. Our experiments presented results at the patch-level and image-level. Applied on publicly available Foot Ulcer Segmentation (FUSeg) Challenge dataset from MICCAI 2021, our model achieved state-of-the-art image-level performance of 88.22% in terms of Dice similarity score and ranked second in the official challenge leaderboard. We also showed an extremely simple solution that could be compared against the more advanced architectures.