Volumetric Axial Disentanglement Enabling Advancing in Medical Image Segmentation
Volumetric Axial Disentanglement Enabling Advancing in Medical Image Segmentation
Xingru Huang, Jian Huang, Yihao Guo, Tianyun Zhang, Zhao Huang, Yaqi Wang, Ruipu Tang, Guangliang Cheng, Shaowei Jiang, Zhiwen Zheng, Jin Liu, Renjie Ruan, Xiaoshuai Zhang
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1197-1205.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/134
Information retrieved from three dimensions is treated uniformly in CNN-based volumetric segmentation methods. However, such neglect of axial disparities fails to capture true spatio-temporal variations. This paper introduces the volumetric axial disentanglement to address the disparities in spatial information along different axial dimensions. Building on this concept, we propose the Post-Axial Refiner (PaR) module to refine segmentation masks by implementing axial disentanglement on the specific axis of the volumetric medical sequences. As a plug-and-play enhancement to existing volumetric segmentation architecture, PaR further utilizes specialized attention approaches to learn disentangled post-decoding features, enhancing spatial representation and structural detail. Validation on various datasets demonstrates PaR's consistent elevation of segmentation precision and boundary clarity across 11 baselines and different imaging modalities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. Experimental tests demonstrate the ability of volumetric axial disentanglement to refine the segmentation of volumetric medical images. Code is released at https://github.com/IMOP-lab/PaR-Pytorch.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Biomedical image analysis
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Bioinformatics
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Health and medicine
