# Distillation for medical imaging

Area: [Knowledge distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/distill/distillation-for-medical-imaging/

## Key facts

- Distillation for medical imaging: 191 papers on arXiv since 2021 (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- 14 of its 191 mapped papers (7%) cite “Efficient Medical Image Segmentation Based on Knowledge Distillation” (2021, arXiv 2108.09987).
- 11 of its 191 mapped papers (6%) cite “Knowledge distillation from multi-modal to mono-modal segmentation networks” (2021, arXiv 2106.09564).
- 3 new papers 25 Sep–14 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [Efficient Medical Image Segmentation Based on Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09987/) (2021), cited by 14 papers here
- [Knowledge distillation from multi-modal to mono-modal segmentation networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09564/) (2021), cited by 11 papers here
- [DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12081/) (2022), cited by 6 papers here
- [Categorical Relation-Preserving Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03225/) (2021), cited by 4 papers here
- [Alternate Diverse Teaching for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17325/) (2023), cited by 4 papers here
- [Variational Knowledge Distillation for Disease Classification in Chest X-Rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10825/) (2021), cited by 3 papers here
- [Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation for Vision-to-Sensor Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01849/) (2021), cited by 3 papers here
- [SSD-KD: A Self-supervised Diverse Knowledge Distillation Method for Lightweight Skin Lesion Classification Using Dermoscopic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11490/) (2022), cited by 3 papers here
- [Explainable Knowledge Distillation for On-device Chest X-Ray Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06244/) (2023), cited by 3 papers here
- [ReCo-KD: Region- and Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08301/) (2026), cited by 3 papers here

## New (25 Sep–14 Oct)

- [Efficient Multi-Granularity Knowledge Transfer for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11303/) (2026-10-08)
- [Multimodal Knowledge Distillation for Gastric Adenocarcinoma Classification from Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07913/) (2026-10-06)
- [From UNI2-h to ConvNeXt-T: Lightweight Nuclei Instance Segmentation via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35203/) (2026-09-28)