# QMaxViT-Unet+: A Query-Based MaxViT-Unet with Edge Enhancement for Scribble-Supervised Segmentation of Medical Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [Multivariate mixture model for myocardium segmentation combining multi-source images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08820/) (2016)
- [LeViT-UNet: Make Faster Encoders with Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08623/) (2021)
- [Video Polyp Segmentation: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14291/) (2022)
- [Progressively Normalized Self-Attention Network for Video Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08468/) (2021)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [A Robust Volumetric Transformer for Accurate 3D Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13300/) (2021)
- [ET-Net: A Generic Edge-aTtention Guidance Network for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10936/) (2019)
- [Scribble-based Hierarchical Weakly Supervised Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02014/) (2019)
- [ShapePU: A New PU Learning Framework Regularized by Global Consistency for Scribble Supervised Cardiac Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02118/) (2022)
- [ScribFormer: Transformer Makes CNN Work Better for Scribble-based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02029/) (2024)
- [ScribbleVC: Scribble-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Vision-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16226/) (2023)
- [S2ME: Spatial-Spectral Mutual Teaching and Ensemble Learning for Scribble-supervised Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00451/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AdaKAN: A dual-branch adaptive Kolmogorov-Arnold network for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22891/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The deployment of advanced deep learning models for medical image segmentation is often constrained by the requirement for extensively annotated datasets. Weakly-supervised learning, which allows less precise labels, has become a promising solution to this challenge. Building on this approach, we propose QMaxViT-Unet+, a novel framework for scribble-supervised medical image segmentation. This framework is built on the U-Net architecture, with the encoder and decoder replaced by Multi-Axis Vision Transformer (MaxViT) blocks. These blocks enhance the model's ability to learn local and global features efficiently. Additionally, our approach integrates a query-based Transformer decoder to refine features and an edge enhancement module to compensate for the limited boundary information in the scribble label. We evaluate the proposed QMaxViT-Unet+ on four public datasets focused on cardiac structures, colorectal polyps, and breast cancer: ACDC, MS-CMRSeg, SUN-SEG, and BUSI. Evaluation metrics include the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and the 95th percentile of Hausdorff distance (HD95). Experimental results show that QMaxViT-Unet+ achieves 89.1% DSC and 1.316mm HD95 on ACDC, 88.4% DSC and 2.226mm HD95 on MS-CMRSeg, 71.4% DSC and 4.996mm HD95 on SUN-SEG, and 69.4% DSC and 50.122mm HD95 on BUSI. These results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency while remaining competitive with fully-supervised learning approaches. This makes it ideal for medical image analysis, where high-quality annotations are often scarce and require significant effort and expense. The code is available at: https://github.com/anpc849/QMaxViT-Unet