A Tiny Efficient U-Net with Gated Linear Attention for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is crucial for diagnosis and treatment planning. While recent advancements in deep learning, particularly UNet variants, have improved segmentation performance, they often result in increased model complexity, which limits their real-time applicability on resource-constrained devices in clinical settings. To address this challenge, we present the Tiny Efficient U-Net (TE-UNet), a novel lightweight model balancing efficiency and accuracy. TE-UNet uses a U-shaped encoder-decoder framework with a gated linear attention mechanism to process low-level and high-level features, preserving details and reducing complexity. It employs depth-wise separable convolutions for higher-level processing, enhancing efficiency without losing performance. Additionally, skip connections improve multi-scale feature extraction and information flow. Experiments on two public datasets across different modalities demonstrate that TE-UNet outperforms ten state-of-the-art methods, maintaining a parameter size under 40KB and low computational cost. TE-UNet makes real-time segmentation more accessible for various clinical applications.