Papers › MISSU: 3D Medical Image Segmentation via Self-distilling TransUNet

MISSU: 3D Medical Image Segmentation via Self-distilling TransUNet

2 Jun 2022arXiv:2206.00902archive 2025-07-28

Nan Wang, Shaohui Lin, Xiaoxiao Li, Ke Li, Yunhang Shen, Yue Gao, Lizhuang Ma

U-Nets have achieved tremendous success in medical image segmentation. Nevertheless, it may suffer limitations in global (long-range) contextual interactions and edge-detail preservation. In contrast, Transformer has an excellent ability to capture long-range dependencies by leveraging the self-attention mechanism into the encoder. Although Transformer was born to model the long-range dependency on the extracted feature maps, it still suffers from extreme computational and spatial complexities in processing high-resolution 3D feature maps. This motivates us to design the efficiently Transformer-based UNet model and study the feasibility of Transformer-based network architectures for medical image segmentation tasks. To this end, we propose to self-distill a Transformer-based UNet for medical image segmentation, which simultaneously learns global semantic information and local spatial-detailed features. Meanwhile, a local multi-scale fusion block is first proposed to refine fine-grained details from the skipped connections in the encoder by the main CNN stem through self-distillation, only computed during training and removed at inference with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments on BraTS 2019 and CHAOS datasets show that our MISSU achieves the best performance over previous state-of-the-art methods. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/wangn123/MISSU.git}

Paper PDF Code

Code

wangn123/missu officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Segmentation Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position Encodings Adam Attention BPE Dense Connections Dropout Label Smoothing Layer Normalization Linear Layer Multi-Head Attention Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer Residual Connection Softmax Transformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections