# D-Net: Dynamic Large Kernel with Dynamic Feature Fusion for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10674/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08023/) (2022)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [TransBTS: Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04430/) (2021)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [CoTr: Efficiently Bridging CNN and Transformer for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03024/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Beyond Pixel-Wise Supervision for Medical Image Segmentation: From Traditional Models to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13239/) (2024)
- [AgileFormer: Spatially Agile Transformer UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00122/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Feature Fusion of U-like Networks with Dynamic Skip Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14610/) (2025)
- [MM-UNet: Morph Mamba U-shaped Convolutional Networks for Retinal Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02193/) (2025)
- [D2-MLP: Dynamic Decomposed MLP Mixer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08905/) (2024)
- [3D Deep-learning-based Segmentation of Human Skin Sweat Glands and Their 3D Morphological Response to Temperature Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17255/) (2025)
- [MS-UMamba: An Improved Vision Mamba Unet for Fetal Abdominal Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12441/) (2025)
- [RAPNet: A Receptive-Field Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network for Pansharpening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10461/) (2025)
- [PLAS-Net: Pixel-Level Area Segmentation for UAV-Based Beach Litter Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21313/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hierarchical transformers have achieved significant success in medical image segmentation due to their large receptive field and capabilities of effectively leveraging global long-range contextual information. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can also deliver a large receptive field by using large kernels, enabling them to achieve competitive performance with fewer model parameters. However, CNNs incorporated with large convolutional kernels remain constrained in adaptively capturing multi-scale features from organs with large variations in shape and size due to the employment of fixed-sized kernels. Additionally, they are unable to utilize global contextual information efficiently. To address these limitations, we propose Dynamic Large Kernel (DLK) and Dynamic Feature Fusion (DFF) modules. The DLK module employs multiple large kernels with varying kernel sizes and dilation rates to capture multi-scale features. Subsequently, a dynamic selection mechanism is utilized to adaptively highlight the most important spatial features based on global information. Additionally, the DFF module is proposed to adaptively fuse multi-scale local feature maps based on their global information. We integrate DLK and DFF in a hierarchical transformer architecture to develop a novel architecture, termed D-Net. D-Net is able to effectively utilize a multi-scale large receptive field and adaptively harness global contextual information. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that D-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art models in the two volumetric segmentation tasks, including abdominal multi-organ segmentation and multi-modality brain tumor segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/sotiraslab/DLK.