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In the era of the ever-increasing need for computing power, deep learning (DL) algorithms are becoming critical for accomplishing success in various domains, such as accessibility and processing of information from the quantum of data present in the physical, digital, and biological realms. Medical image segmentation is one such application of DL in the healthcare sector. The segmentation of medical images, such as retinal images, enables an efficient analytical process for diagnostics and medical procedures. To segment regions of interest in medical images, U-Net has been primarily used as the baseline DL architecture that consists of contracting and expanding paths for capturing semantic features and precision localization. Although several forms of U-Net have shown promise, its limitations such as hardware memory requirements and inaccurate localization of nonstandard shapes still need to be addressed effectively. In this work, we propose U-PEN++, which reconfigures previously developed U-PEN (U-Net with Progressively Expanded Neuron) architecture by introducing a new module named Progressively Expanded Neuron with Attention (PEN-A) that consists of Maclaurin Series of a nonlinear function and multi-head attention mechanism. The proposed PEN-A module enriches the feature representation by capturing more relevant contextual information when compared to the U-PEN model. Moreover, the proposed model removes excessive hidden layers, resulting in less trainable parameters when compared to U-PEN. Experimental analysis performed on DRIVE and CHASE datasets demonstrated more effective segmentation and parameter efficiency of the proposed U-PEN++ architecture for retinal image segmentation tasks when compared to U-Net, U-PEN, and Residual U-Net architectures.
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