# How Well Do Supervised 3D Models Transfer to Medical Imaging Tasks?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11253 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11253/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 73 of its 108 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04056/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14791/) (2021)
- [Rethinking ImageNet Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08883/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09508/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Calibration and Uncertainty for multiRater Volume Assessment in multiorgan Segmentation (CURVAS) challenge results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08685/) (2025)
- [Scaling Self-Supervised and Cross-Modal Pretraining for Volumetric CT Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17209/) (2025)
- [MedNeXt-v2: Scaling 3D ConvNeXts for Large-Scale Supervised Representation Learning in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17774/) (2025)
- [U-VLM: Hierarchical Vision Language Modeling for Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00479/) (2026)
- [Generalist Models in Medical Image Segmentation: A Survey and Performance Comparison with Task-Specific Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10825/) (2025)
- [SCALE-VLP: Soft-Weighted Contrastive Volumetric Vision-Language Pre-training with Spatial-Knowledge Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02996/) (2025)
- [CoralBay: A Self-Supervised CT Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03888/) (2026)
- [Opportunistic Promptable Segmentation: Leveraging Routine Radiological Annotations to Guide 3D CT Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00309/) (2026)
- [Learning Generalizable 3D Medical Image Representations from Mask-Guided Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13660/) (2026)
- [When Do Cheap Probes Predict Expensive Training? Probing 3D-CT Encoders for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22771/) (2026)
- [AdaViT: Adaptive Vision Transformer for Flexible Pretrain and Finetune with Variable 3D Medical Image Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03589/) (2025)
- [Good Enough? An Investigation on the Impact of Label Quality in Large-Scale Medical Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20928/) (2025)
- [DINO-MVR: Multi-View Readout of Frozen DINOv3 for Annotation-Efficient Medical Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07221/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking transferability of SSL pretraining to same and different modality segmentation tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18491/) (2026)
- [Multi-Granularity 3D Kidney Lesion Characterization from CT Volumes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04365/) (2026)
- [Empirical investigation of 3D CT Foundation Models and Unsupervised Adaptation for Head and Neck Cancer Recurrence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00071/) (2026)
- [Segmentation Pre-training for Label-Efficient Lumbar Spine Degeneration Grading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04810/) (2026)
- [KneePreM: Towards 3D Knee MRI Foundation Models via Large-Scale Unlabeled Pretraining and Label-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31461/) (2026)
- [Merlin Plus: A Large-Scale, Multi-Cancer, Image-Mask-Report Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36436/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm has become prominent in transfer learning. For example, if the model is pre-trained on ImageNet and then fine-tuned to PASCAL, it can significantly outperform that trained on PASCAL from scratch. While ImageNet pre-training has shown enormous success, it is formed in 2D, and the learned features are for classification tasks; when transferring to more diverse tasks, like 3D image segmentation, its performance is inevitably compromised due to the deviation from the original ImageNet context. A significant challenge lies in the lack of large, annotated 3D datasets rivaling the scale of ImageNet for model pre-training. To overcome this challenge, we make two contributions. Firstly, we construct AbdomenAtlas 1.1 that comprises 9,262 three-dimensional computed tomography (CT) volumes with high-quality, per-voxel annotations of 25 anatomical structures and pseudo annotations of seven tumor types. Secondly, we develop a suite of models that are pre-trained on our AbdomenAtlas 1.1 for transfer learning. Our preliminary analyses indicate that the model trained only with 21 CT volumes, 672 masks, and 40 GPU hours has a transfer learning ability similar to the model trained with 5,050 (unlabeled) CT volumes and 1,152 GPU hours. More importantly, the transfer learning ability of supervised models can further scale up with larger annotated datasets, achieving significantly better performance than preexisting pre-trained models, irrespective of their pre-training methodologies or data sources. We hope this study can facilitate collective efforts in constructing larger 3D medical datasets and more releases of supervised pre-trained models.