{"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/multi-scale-hierarchical-vision-transformer-1","title":"Multi-scale Hierarchical Vision Transformer with Cascaded Attention Decoding for Medical Image Segmentation","arxiv_id":"2303.16892","date":"2023-03-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Md Mostafijur Rahman","Radu Marculescu"],"abstract":"Transformers have shown great success in medical image segmentation. However, transformers may exhibit a limited generalization ability due to the underlying single-scale self-attention (SA) mechanism. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a Multi-scale hiERarchical vIsion Transformer (MERIT) backbone network, which improves the generalizability of the model by computing SA at multiple scales. We also incorporate an attention-based decoder, namely Cascaded Attention Decoding (CASCADE), for further refinement of multi-stage features generated by MERIT. Finally, we introduce an effective multi-stage feature mixing loss aggregation (MUTATION) method for better model training via implicit ensembling. Our experiments on two widely used medical image segmentation benchmarks (i.e., Synapse Multi-organ, ACDC) demonstrate the superior performance of MERIT over state-of-the-art methods. Our MERIT architecture and MUTATION loss aggregation can be used with downstream medical image and semantic segmentation tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16892v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.16892v1.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":"multi-scale-hierarchical-vision-transformer-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/SLDGroup/MERIT","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"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":"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":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"},{"method_slug":"vision-transformer","method_name":"Vision Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/medical-image-segmentation-on-automatic","task":"Medical Image Segmentation","dataset":"Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC)","model":"MERIT","rank_in_archive_order":6,"of":20,"metrics":{"Avg DSC":"92.32"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/medical-image-segmentation-on-miccai-2015-1","task":"Medical Image Segmentation","dataset":"MICCAI 2015 Multi-Atlas Abdomen Labeling Challenge","model":"MERIT","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":8,"metrics":{"Avg DSC":"84.90","Avg HD":"13.22"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/medical-image-segmentation-on-synapse-multi","task":"Medical Image Segmentation","dataset":"Synapse multi-organ CT","model":"MERIT","rank_in_archive_order":9,"of":23,"metrics":{"Avg DSC":"84.90","Avg HD":"13.22"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2303.16892","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.16892","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}