RF-HiT: Rectified Flow Hierarchical Transformer for General Medical Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Djouama, Ahmed Marouane, Belaala, Abir, Sellam, Abdellah Zakaria, Bekhouche, Salah Eddine, Distante, Cosimo, Hadid, Abdenour
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Djouama, Ahmed Marouane
Belaala, Abir
Sellam, Abdellah Zakaria
Bekhouche, Salah Eddine
Distante, Cosimo
Hadid, Abdenour
author_facet Djouama, Ahmed Marouane
Belaala, Abir
Sellam, Abdellah Zakaria
Bekhouche, Salah Eddine
Distante, Cosimo
Hadid, Abdenour
contents Accurate medical image segmentation requires both long-range contextual reasoning and precise boundary delineation, a task where existing transformer- and diffusion-based paradigms are frequently bottlenecked by quadratic computational complexity and prohibitive inference latency. We propose RF-HiT, a Rectified Flow Hierarchical Transformer that integrates an hourglass transformer backbone with a multi-scale hierarchical encoder for anatomically guided feature conditioning. Unlike prior diffusion-based approaches, RF-HiT leverages rectified flow with efficient transformer blocks to achieve linear complexity while requiring only a few discretization steps. The model further fuses conditioning features across resolutions via learnable interpolation, enabling effective multi-scale representation with minimal computational overhead. As a result, RF-HiT achieves a strong efficiency-performance trade-off, requiring only 10.14 GFLOPs, 13.6M parameters, and inference in as few as three steps. Despite its compact design, RF-HiT attains 91.27% mean Dice on ACDC and 87.40% on BraTS 2021, achieving performance comparable to or exceeding that of significantly more intensive architectures. This demonstrates its strong potential as a robust, computationally efficient foundation for real-time clinical segmentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19570
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RF-HiT: Rectified Flow Hierarchical Transformer for General Medical Image Segmentation
Djouama, Ahmed Marouane
Belaala, Abir
Sellam, Abdellah Zakaria
Bekhouche, Salah Eddine
Distante, Cosimo
Hadid, Abdenour
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurate medical image segmentation requires both long-range contextual reasoning and precise boundary delineation, a task where existing transformer- and diffusion-based paradigms are frequently bottlenecked by quadratic computational complexity and prohibitive inference latency. We propose RF-HiT, a Rectified Flow Hierarchical Transformer that integrates an hourglass transformer backbone with a multi-scale hierarchical encoder for anatomically guided feature conditioning. Unlike prior diffusion-based approaches, RF-HiT leverages rectified flow with efficient transformer blocks to achieve linear complexity while requiring only a few discretization steps. The model further fuses conditioning features across resolutions via learnable interpolation, enabling effective multi-scale representation with minimal computational overhead. As a result, RF-HiT achieves a strong efficiency-performance trade-off, requiring only 10.14 GFLOPs, 13.6M parameters, and inference in as few as three steps. Despite its compact design, RF-HiT attains 91.27% mean Dice on ACDC and 87.40% on BraTS 2021, achieving performance comparable to or exceeding that of significantly more intensive architectures. This demonstrates its strong potential as a robust, computationally efficient foundation for real-time clinical segmentation.
title RF-HiT: Rectified Flow Hierarchical Transformer for General Medical Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19570