EZUAS: Evolutionary Zero-shot U-shape Architecture Search for Medical Image Segmentation
Jiahong Wei, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference · 2024
Recently, deep learning-based methods have become the mainstream for medical image segmentation. Since manually designing deep neural networks (DNNs) is laborious and time-consuming, neural architecture search (NAS) becomes a popular stream for automatically designing DNNs for medical image segmentation. However, existing NAS work for medical image segmentation is still computationally expensive. Given the limited computation power, it is not always applicable to search for a well-performing model from an enlarged search space. In this paper, we propose EZUAS, a novel method of evolutionary zero-shot NAS for medical image segmentation, to address these issues. First, a new search space is designed for the automated design of DNNs. A genetic algorithm (GA) with an aligned crossover operation is then leveraged to search the network architectures under the model complexity constraints to get performant and lightweight models. In addition, a variable-length integer encoding scheme is devised to encode the candidate U-shaped DNNs with different stages. We conduct experiments on two commonly used medical image segmentation datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed EZUAS. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method can find a model much faster (about 0.04 GPU day) and achieve the best performance with lower computational complexity.