Detail Consistent Stage-Wise Distillation for Efficient 3D MRI Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fan, Mengchen, Geng, Baocheng, Xiao, Xi, Wang, Tianyang, Mei, Siyuan, Che, Pulin, Jiang, Xiaoqian, Lan, Qizhen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Fan, Mengchen
Geng, Baocheng
Xiao, Xi
Wang, Tianyang
Mei, Siyuan
Che, Pulin
Jiang, Xiaoqian
Lan, Qizhen
author_facet Fan, Mengchen
Geng, Baocheng
Xiao, Xi
Wang, Tianyang
Mei, Siyuan
Che, Pulin
Jiang, Xiaoqian
Lan, Qizhen
contents Deploying high-performing 3D medical image segmenters (e.g., nnU-Net) is often limited by memory footprint and inference latency. Compression is therefore necessary, but compact 3D encoders tend to lose fine structural cues (small lesions and sharp boundaries) as downsampling repeats across multi-resolution stages. We propose Detail Consistent Distillation (DCD), a stage-wise distillation framework that preserves structural detail across scales by aligning teacher-student features in a wavelet-decomposed representation. At each encoder stage, DCD distills directional detail components in the wavelet domain while leaving the coarse approximation comparatively unconstrained, avoiding over-regularization of global semantics. DCD is used only during training and introduces no inference-time overhead. Experiments on the BraTS 2024 and ISLES 2022 benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in MRI segmentation using 3D multi-modal data. Code and implementation details for DCD are publicly available at https://github.com/ClinicaAlpha/DCD-3D-MedSeg.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_26382
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Detail Consistent Stage-Wise Distillation for Efficient 3D MRI Segmentation
Fan, Mengchen
Geng, Baocheng
Xiao, Xi
Wang, Tianyang
Mei, Siyuan
Che, Pulin
Jiang, Xiaoqian
Lan, Qizhen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deploying high-performing 3D medical image segmenters (e.g., nnU-Net) is often limited by memory footprint and inference latency. Compression is therefore necessary, but compact 3D encoders tend to lose fine structural cues (small lesions and sharp boundaries) as downsampling repeats across multi-resolution stages. We propose Detail Consistent Distillation (DCD), a stage-wise distillation framework that preserves structural detail across scales by aligning teacher-student features in a wavelet-decomposed representation. At each encoder stage, DCD distills directional detail components in the wavelet domain while leaving the coarse approximation comparatively unconstrained, avoiding over-regularization of global semantics. DCD is used only during training and introduces no inference-time overhead. Experiments on the BraTS 2024 and ISLES 2022 benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in MRI segmentation using 3D multi-modal data. Code and implementation details for DCD are publicly available at https://github.com/ClinicaAlpha/DCD-3D-MedSeg.
title Detail Consistent Stage-Wise Distillation for Efficient 3D MRI Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26382