Papers › MedNeXt: Transformer-driven Scaling of ConvNets for Medical Image Segmentation

MedNeXt: Transformer-driven Scaling of ConvNets for Medical Image Segmentation

17 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.09975archive 2025-07-28

Saikat Roy, Gregor Koehler, Constantin Ulrich, Michael Baumgartner, Jens Petersen, Fabian Isensee, Paul F. Jaeger, Klaus Maier-Hein

There has been exploding interest in embracing Transformer-based architectures for medical image segmentation. However, the lack of large-scale annotated medical datasets make achieving performances equivalent to those in natural images challenging. Convolutional networks, in contrast, have higher inductive biases and consequently, are easily trainable to high performance. Recently, the ConvNeXt architecture attempted to modernize the standard ConvNet by mirroring Transformer blocks. In this work, we improve upon this to design a modernized and scalable convolutional architecture customized to challenges of data-scarce medical settings. We introduce MedNeXt, a Transformer-inspired large kernel segmentation network which introduces - 1) A fully ConvNeXt 3D Encoder-Decoder Network for medical image segmentation, 2) Residual ConvNeXt up and downsampling blocks to preserve semantic richness across scales, 3) A novel technique to iteratively increase kernel sizes by upsampling small kernel networks, to prevent performance saturation on limited medical data, 4) Compound scaling at multiple levels (depth, width, kernel size) of MedNeXt. This leads to state-of-the-art performance on 4 tasks on CT and MRI modalities and varying dataset sizes, representing a modernized deep architecture for medical image segmentation. Our code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/MedNeXt.

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convert_CT_seg MIC-DKFZ/MedNeXt/nnunet_mednext/dataset_conversion/Task037_038_Chaos_Challenge.py official repository ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c6cd5ad91c3a2851 · report
convert_MR_seg MIC-DKFZ/MedNeXt/nnunet_mednext/dataset_conversion/Task037_038_Chaos_Challenge.py official repository ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 74dcea3d4dcc90a5 · report
convert_labels_back_to_BraTS MIC-DKFZ/MedNeXt/nnunet_mednext/dataset_conversion/Task032_BraTS_2018.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · a2c8b38ba9393780 · report
load_png_stack MIC-DKFZ/MedNeXt/nnunet_mednext/dataset_conversion/Task037_038_Chaos_Challenge.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 29176ca87f23c2d7 · report

Tasks

DecoderImage SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationSegmentationSemantic SegmentationVolumetric Medical Image Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Medical Image Segmentation AMOS MedNeXt-L (5x5x5) Average Dice 91.77 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Segmentation Synapse multi-organ CT MedNeXt-L (5x5x5) Avg DSC 88.76 #5 of 23 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Concatenated Skip ConnectionConvNeXtConvolutionDepthwise ConvolutionMax PoolingReLUResidual ConnectionTransformerU-Net

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