# Lightweight image segmentation for echocardiography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03631 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03631/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10486/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Segmentation using an Open Large-Scale Dataset in 2D Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06948/) (2019)
- [nnU-Net Revisited: A Call for Rigorous Validation in 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09556/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Cardiac Segmentation using Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01210/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate segmentation of the left ventricle in echocardiography can enable fully automatic extraction of clinical measurements such as volumes and ejection fraction. While models configured by nnU-Net perform well, they are large and slow, thus limiting real-time use. We identified the most effective components of nnU-Net for cardiac segmentation through an ablation study, incrementally evaluating data augmentation schemes, architectural modifications, loss functions, and post-processing techniques. Our analysis revealed that simple affine augmentations and deep supervision drive performance, while complex augmentations and large model capacity offer diminishing returns. Based on these insights, we developed a lightweight U-Net (2M vs 33M parameters) that achieves statistically equivalent performance to nnU-Net on CAMUS (N=500) with Dice scores of 0.93/0.85/0.89 vs 0.93/0.86/0.89 for LV/MYO/LA (p>0.05), while being 16 times smaller and 4 times faster (1.35ms vs 5.40ms per frame) than the default nnU-Net configuration. Cross-dataset evaluation on an internal dataset (N=311) confirms comparable generalization.