Work

Lightweight U-Net for Blood Vessels Segmentation in X-Ray Coronary Angiography

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Blood vessel segmentation in X-ray coronary angiography (XCA) plays a crucial role in diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, enabling a precise assessment of arterial structures. However, segmentation is challenging due to a low signal-to-noise ratio, interfering background structures, and vessel bifurcations, which hinder the accuracy of deep learning models. Additionally, deep learning models for this task often require high computational resources, limiting their practical application in real-time clinical settings. This study proposes a lightweight variant of the U-Net architecture using a structured kernel pruning strategy inspired by the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. The pruning method systematically removes entire convolutional filters from each layer based on a global reduction factor, generating compact subnetworks that retain key representational capacity. This results in a significantly smaller model without compromising the segmentation performance. This approach is evaluated on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements in segmentation accuracy compared to the vanilla U-Net. Additionally, model complexity is significantly reduced from 31 M to 1.9 M parameters, improving efficiency while maintaining high segmentation quality.

Source: Journal of Imaging

DOI: 10.3390/jimaging11040106

Authors: Jesus Salvador Ramos-Cortez, Dora E. Alvarado-Carrillo, Emmanuel Ovalle-Magallanes, Juan Gabriel Avina-Cervantes

Institutions: Universidad de Guanajuato, Universidad Virtual del Estado de Guanajuato, Universidad La Salle Bajío

Language: English

Topic: Medical Image Segmentation Techniques

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,172

Funder: Universidad de Guanajuato