No More Sliding Window: Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation with Differentiable Top-k Patch Sampling

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Main Authors: Jeon, Young Seok, Yang, Hongfei, Fu, Huazhu, Feng, Mengling
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jeon, Young Seok
Yang, Hongfei
Fu, Huazhu
Feng, Mengling
author_facet Jeon, Young Seok
Yang, Hongfei
Fu, Huazhu
Feng, Mengling
contents 3D models surpass 2D models in CT/MRI segmentation by effectively capturing inter-slice relationships. However, the added depth dimension substantially increases memory consumption. While patch-based training alleviates memory constraints, it significantly slows down the inference speed due to the sliding window (SW) approach. We propose No-More-Sliding-Window (NMSW), a novel end-to-end trainable framework that enhances the efficiency of generic 3D segmentation backbone during an inference step by eliminating the need for SW. NMSW employs a differentiable Top-k module to selectively sample only the most relevant patches, thereby minimizing redundant computations. When patch-level predictions are insufficient, the framework intelligently leverages coarse global predictions to refine results. Evaluated across 3 tasks using 3 segmentation backbones, NMSW achieves competitive accuracy compared to SW inference while significantly reducing computational complexity by 91% (88.0 to 8.00 TMACs). Moreover, it delivers a 9.1x faster inference on the H100 GPU (99.0 to 8.3 sec) and a 11.1x faster inference on the Xeon Gold CPU (2110 to 189 sec). NMSW is model-agnostic, further boosting efficiency when integrated with any existing efficient segmentation backbones. The code is avaialble: https://github.com/Youngseok0001/open_nmsw.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10814
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle No More Sliding Window: Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation with Differentiable Top-k Patch Sampling
Jeon, Young Seok
Yang, Hongfei
Fu, Huazhu
Feng, Mengling
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
3D models surpass 2D models in CT/MRI segmentation by effectively capturing inter-slice relationships. However, the added depth dimension substantially increases memory consumption. While patch-based training alleviates memory constraints, it significantly slows down the inference speed due to the sliding window (SW) approach. We propose No-More-Sliding-Window (NMSW), a novel end-to-end trainable framework that enhances the efficiency of generic 3D segmentation backbone during an inference step by eliminating the need for SW. NMSW employs a differentiable Top-k module to selectively sample only the most relevant patches, thereby minimizing redundant computations. When patch-level predictions are insufficient, the framework intelligently leverages coarse global predictions to refine results. Evaluated across 3 tasks using 3 segmentation backbones, NMSW achieves competitive accuracy compared to SW inference while significantly reducing computational complexity by 91% (88.0 to 8.00 TMACs). Moreover, it delivers a 9.1x faster inference on the H100 GPU (99.0 to 8.3 sec) and a 11.1x faster inference on the Xeon Gold CPU (2110 to 189 sec). NMSW is model-agnostic, further boosting efficiency when integrated with any existing efficient segmentation backbones. The code is avaialble: https://github.com/Youngseok0001/open_nmsw.
title No More Sliding Window: Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation with Differentiable Top-k Patch Sampling
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10814