PnP-AE: A Plug-and-Play Module for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation
Qiankun Li, Xiaolong Huang, Bo Fang, Yani Zhang, Yongyong Chen, Junxin Chen · 2023
In recent years, 3D volumetric medical images have been widely used in clinical diagnosis, however, the popular 2D networks were reported unsuitable for segmenting them. In this direction, we propose a plug-and-play (PnP-AE) module to improve the performance of using 2D network for 3D medical image segmentation. Our method takes advantage of the intrinsic correlation between adjacent slices, by multiple encoders and fusion components to decouple plane feature extraction and depth information integration. In addition, the proposed weight sharing and feature storage strategies make PnP-AE extremely efficient. Our method is able to conveniently incorporate with mainstream 2D networks to segment 3D volumetric medical images. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our method. The source code is available at https://github.com/qklee-lz/PnP-AE.