Improved U-Net: Fully Convolutional Network Model for Skin-Lesion Segmentation

The early and accurate diagnosis of skin cancer is crucial for providing patients with advanced treatment by focusing medical personnel on specific parts of the skin. Networks based on encoder-decoder architectures have been effectively implemented for numerous computer-vision applications. U-Net, one of CNN architectures based on the encoder-decoder network, has achieved successful performance for skin-lesion segmentation. However, this network has several drawbacks caused by its upsampling method and activation function. In this paper, a fully convolutional network and its architecture are proposed with a modified U-Net, in which a bilinear interpolation method is used for upsampling with a block of convolution layers followed by parametric rectified linear-unit non-linearity. To avoid overfitting, a dropout is applied after each convolution block. The results demonstrate that our recommended technique achieves state-of-the-art performance for skin-lesion segmentation with 94% pixel accuracy and a 88% dice coefficient, respectively.