# D2-MLP: Dynamic Decomposed MLP Mixer for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08905/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [AbdomenCT-1K: Is Abdominal Organ Segmentation A Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14808/) (2020)
- [UCTransNet: Rethinking the Skip Connections in U-Net from a Channel-wise Perspective with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04335/) (2021)
- [UNeXt: MLP-based Rapid Medical Image Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04967/) (2022)
- [UTNet: A Hybrid Transformer Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00781/) (2021)
- [HiFormer: Hierarchical Multi-scale Representations Using Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08518/) (2022)
- [Medical Image Segmentation Using Squeeze-and-Expansion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09511/) (2021)
- [Directional Connectivity-based Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00145/) (2023)
- [Beyond Fixation: Dynamic Window Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12856/) (2022)
- [Strip-MLP: Efficient Token Interaction for Vision MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11458/) (2023)
- [D-Net: Dynamic Large Kernel with Dynamic Feature Fusion for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10674/) (2024)
- [Dynamic U-Net: Adaptively Calibrate Features for Abdominal Multi-organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07303/) (2024)
- [AgileFormer: Spatially Agile Transformer UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00122/) (2024)
- [3D Shuffle-Mixer: An Efficient Context-Aware Vision Learner of Transformer-MLP Paradigm for Dense Prediction in Medical Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06779/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural networks are widely used in various segmentation tasks in medical images. However, they are challenged to learn global features adaptively due to the inherent locality of convolutional operations. In contrast, MLP Mixers are proposed as a backbone to learn global information across channels with low complexity. However, they cannot capture spatial features efficiently. Additionally, they lack effective mechanisms to fuse and mix features adaptively. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel Dynamic Decomposed Mixer module. It is designed to employ novel Mixers to extract features and aggregate information across different spatial locations and channels. Additionally, it employs novel dynamic mixing mechanisms to model inter-dependencies between channel and spatial feature representations and to fuse them adaptively. Subsequently, we incorporate it into a U-shaped Transformer-based architecture to generate a novel network, termed the Dynamic Decomposed MLP Mixer. We evaluated it for medical image segmentation on two datasets, and it achieved superior segmentation performance than other state-of-the-art methods.