HarDNet-DFUS: An Enhanced Harmonically-Connected Network for Diabetic Foot Ulcer Image Segmentation and Colonoscopy Polyp Segmentation

Abstract: We present a neural network architecture for medical image segmentation of diabetic foot ulcers and colonoscopy polyps. Diabetic foot ulcers are caused by neuropathic and vascular complications of diabetes mellitus. In order to provide a proper diagnosis and treatment, wound care professionals need to extract accurate morphological features from the foot wounds. Using computer-aided systems is a promising approach to extract related morphological features and segment the lesions. We propose a convolution neural network called HarDNet-DFUS by enhancing the backbone and replacing the decoder of HarDNet-MSEG, which was SOTA for colonoscopy polyp segmentation in 2021. For the MICCAI 2022 Diabetic Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge (DFUC2022), we train HarDNet-DFUS using the DFUC2022 dataset and increase its robustness by means of five-fold cross validation, Test Time Augmentation, etc. In the validation phase of DFUC2022, HarDNet-DFUS achieved 0.7063 mean dice and was ranked third among all participants. In the final testing phase of DFUC2022, it achieved 0.7287 mean dice and was the first place winner. HarDNet-DFUS also deliver excellent performance for the colonoscopy polyp segmentation task. It achieves 0.924 mean Dice on the famous Kvasir dataset, an improvement of 1.2\% over the original HarDNet-MSEG. The codes are available on https://github.com/kytimmylai/DFUC2022 (for Diabetic Foot Ulcers Segmentation) and https://github.com/YuWenLo/HarDNet-DFUS (for Colonoscopy Polyp Segmentation).