{"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/hiformer-hierarchical-multi-scale","title":"HiFormer: Hierarchical Multi-scale Representations Using Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation","arxiv_id":"2207.08518","date":"2022-07-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Moein Heidari","Amirhossein Kazerouni","Milad Soltany","Reza Azad","Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam","Julien Cohen-Adad","Dorit Merhof"],"abstract":"Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been the consensus for medical image segmentation tasks. However, they suffer from the limitation in modeling long-range dependencies and spatial correlations due to the nature of convolution operation. Although transformers were first developed to address this issue, they fail to capture low-level features. In contrast, it is demonstrated that both local and global features are crucial for dense prediction, such as segmenting in challenging contexts. In this paper, we propose HiFormer, a novel method that efficiently bridges a CNN and a transformer for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we design two multi-scale feature representations using the seminal Swin Transformer module and a CNN-based encoder. To secure a fine fusion of global and local features obtained from the two aforementioned representations, we propose a Double-Level Fusion (DLF) module in the skip connection of the encoder-decoder structure. Extensive experiments on various medical image segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HiFormer over other CNN-based, transformer-based, and hybrid methods in terms of computational complexity, and quantitative and qualitative results. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/amirhossein-kz/HiFormer","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.08518v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.08518v2.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":"hiformer-hierarchical-multi-scale","repo_url":"https://github.com/amirhossein-kz/hiformer","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"medical-image-segmentation","task_name":"Medical Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"stochastic-depth","method_name":"Stochastic Depth"},{"method_slug":"swin-transformer","method_name":"Swin Transformer"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2207.08518","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}