# LSU-Net: Lightweight Automatic Organs Segmentation Network For Medical Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00042/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2025.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [UNet 3+: A Full-Scale Connected UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08790/) (2020)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [Medical Transformer: Gated Axial-Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10662/) (2021)
- [TransBTS: Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04430/) (2021)
- [UNeXt: MLP-based Rapid Medical Image Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04967/) (2022)
- [Auxiliary Tasks in Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06334/) (2018)
- [S2-MLPv2: Improved Spatial-Shift MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01072/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Parameter-Efficient 3D Segmentation of Liver and Liver tumors: Depthwise factorization Scales Better Than Dense Convolution with Spatial Dimensionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33077/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

UNet and its variants have widespread applications in medical image segmentation. However, the substantial number of parameters and computational complexity of these models make them less suitable for use in clinical settings with limited computational resources. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Lightweight Shift U-Net (LSU-Net). We integrate the Light Conv Block and the Tokenized Shift Block in a lightweight manner, combining them with a dynamic weight multi-loss design for efficient dynamic weight allocation. The Light Conv Block effectively captures features with a low parameter count by combining standard convolutions with depthwise separable convolutions. The Tokenized Shift Block optimizes feature representation by shifting and capturing deep features through a combination of the Spatial Shift Block and depthwise separable convolutions. Dynamic adjustment of the loss weights at each layer approaches the optimal solution and enhances training stability. We validated LSU-Net on the UWMGI and MSD Colon datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that LSU-Net outperforms most state-of-the-art segmentation architectures.