{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/deformux-net-exploring-a-3d-foundation","title":"DeformUX-Net: Exploring a 3D Foundation Backbone for Medical Image Segmentation with Depthwise Deformable Convolution","arxiv_id":"2310.00199","date":"2023-09-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ho Hin Lee","Quan Liu","Qi Yang","Xin Yu","Shunxing Bao","Yuankai Huo","Bennett A. Landman"],"abstract":"The application of 3D ViTs to medical image segmentation has seen remarkable strides, somewhat overshadowing the budding advancements in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models. Large kernel depthwise convolution has emerged as a promising technique, showcasing capabilities akin to hierarchical transformers and facilitating an expansive effective receptive field (ERF) vital for dense predictions. Despite this, existing core operators, ranging from global-local attention to large kernel convolution, exhibit inherent trade-offs and limitations (e.g., global-local range trade-off, aggregating attentional features). We hypothesize that deformable convolution can be an exploratory alternative to combine all advantages from the previous operators, providing long-range dependency, adaptive spatial aggregation and computational efficiency as a foundation backbone. In this work, we introduce 3D DeformUX-Net, a pioneering volumetric CNN model that adeptly navigates the shortcomings traditionally associated with ViTs and large kernel convolution. Specifically, we revisit volumetric deformable convolution in depth-wise setting to adapt long-range dependency with computational efficiency. Inspired by the concepts of structural re-parameterization for convolution kernel weights, we further generate the deformable tri-planar offsets by adapting a parallel branch (starting from $1\\times1\\times1$ convolution), providing adaptive spatial aggregation across all channels. Our empirical evaluations reveal that the 3D DeformUX-Net consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art ViTs and large kernel convolution models across four challenging public datasets, spanning various scales from organs (KiTS: 0.680 to 0.720, MSD Pancreas: 0.676 to 0.717, AMOS: 0.871 to 0.902) to vessels (e.g., MSD hepatic vessels: 0.635 to 0.671) in mean Dice.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00199v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.00199v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"deformux-net-exploring-a-3d-foundation","repo_url":"https://github.com/masilab/deform-uxnet","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"},{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"medical-image-segmentation","task_name":"Medical Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"deformable-convolution","method_name":"Deformable Convolution"},{"method_slug":"depthwise-convolution","method_name":"Depthwise Convolution"},{"method_slug":"global-local-attention","method_name":"Global-Local Attention"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}