In this paper, a neural architecture search (NAS) framework is proposed for 3D medical image segmentation, to automatically optimize a neural architecture from a large design space. Our NAS framework searches the structure of each layer including neural connectivities and operation types in both of the encoder and decoder. Since optimizing over a large discrete architecture space is difficult due to high-resolution 3D medical images, a novel stochastic sampling algorithm based on a continuous relaxation is also proposed for scalable gradient based optimization. On the 3D medical image segmentation tasks with a benchmark dataset, an automatically designed architecture by the proposed NAS framework outperforms the human-designed 3D U-Net, and moreover this optimized architecture is well suited to be transferred for different tasks.
@article{arxiv.1906.05956,
title = {Scalable Neural Architecture Search for 3D Medical Image Segmentation},
author = {Sungwoong Kim and Ildoo Kim and Sungbin Lim and Woonhyuk Baek and Chiheon Kim and Hyungjoo Cho and Boogeon Yoon and Taesup Kim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05956},
year = {2021}
}