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Accurate segmentation of this region is vital for the quantitative assessment of brain atrophy and the support of diagnostic decision-making. To address limitations in current MRI-based hippocampus segmentation methods\u2014such as indistinct boundaries, small target size, and limited feature representation\u2014this study proposes an enhanced segmentation framework called FED-UNet++. The residual feature reconstruction block (FRBlock) is introduced to strengthen the network\u2019s ability to capture boundary cues and fine-grained structural details in shallow layers. The efficient attention pyramid (EAP) module enhances the integration of multi-scale features and spatial contextual information. The dynamic frequency context network (DFCN) mitigates the decoder\u2019s limitations in capturing long-range dependencies and global semantic structures. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that FED-UNet++ achieves superior performance across multiple evaluation metrics, with an IoU of 74.95% and a Dice coefficient of 84.43% \u00b1 0.21%, outperforming the baseline model in both accuracy and robustness. These findings confirm that FED-UNet++ is highly effective in segmenting small and intricate brain structures like the hippocampus, providing a robust and practical tool for MRI-based analysis of neurodegenerative diseases.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s25165155","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,19]],"date-time":"2025-08-19T15:29:29Z","timestamp":1755617369000},"page":"5155","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":6,"title":["FED-UNet++: An Improved Nested UNet for Hippocampus Segmentation in Alzheimer\u2019s Disease Diagnosis"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"25","author":[{"given":"Liping","family":"Yang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-3289-4212","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Wei","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Shengyu","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0004-8191-6391","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xiaoru","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0000-1658-7887","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Bin","family":"Jing","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Nairui","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Tengchao","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Wei","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University, No. 6543, Satellite Road, Changchun 130022, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,19]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Liu, H., Gamboa, H., and Schultz, T. 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