DUAL SELF-DISTILLATION OF U-SHAPED NETWORKS FOR 3D MEDICAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION.

U-shaped networks and its variants have demonstrated exceptional results for medical image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel dual self-distillation (DSD) framework for U-shaped networks for 3D medical image segmentation. DSD distills knowledge from the ground-truth segmentation labels to the decoder layers and also between the encoder and decoder layers of a single U-shaped network. DSD is a generalized training strategy that could be attached to the backbone architecture of any U-shaped network to further improve its segmentation performance. We attached DSD on two state-of-the-art U-shaped backbones, and extensive experiments on two public 3D medical image segmentation datasets demonstrated significant improvement over those backbones, with negligible increase in trainable parameters and training time. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/soumbane/DualSelfDistillation.