Optimizing 3D U-Net-based Brain Tumor Segmentation with Integer-arithmetic Deep Learning Accelerators

Abstract

While gliomas have become the most common cancerous brain tumors, manual diagnoses from 3D MRIs are time-consuming and possibly inconsistent when conducted by different radiotherapists, which leads to the pressing demand for automatic segmentation of brain tumors. State-of-the-art approaches employ FCNs to automatically segment the MRI scans. In particular, 3D U-Net has achieved notable performance and motivated a series of subsequent works. However, their significant size and heavy computation have impeded their actual deployment. Although there exists a body of literature on the compression of CNNs using low-precision representations, they either focus on storage reduction without computational improvement or cause severe performance degradation. In this article, we propose a CNN training algorithm that approximates weights and activations using non-negative integers along with trained affine mapping functions. Moreover, our approach allows the dot-product operations to be performed in an integer-arithmetic manner and defers the floating-point decoding and encoding phases until the end of layers. Experimental results on BraTS 2018 show that our trained affine mapping approach achieves near full-precision dice accuracy with 8-bit weights and activations. In addition, we achieve a dice accuracy within 0.005 and 0.01 of the full-precision counterparts when using 4-bit and 2-bit precisions, respectively.