# MedFuncta: A Unified Framework for Learning Efficient Medical Neural Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14401 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14401/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [The RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Benchmark on Brain Tumor Segmentation and Radiogenomic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02314/) (2021)
- [COIN: COmpression with Implicit Neural representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03123/) (2021)
- [WIRE: Wavelet Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05187/) (2023)
- [MetaSDF: Meta-learning Signed Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09662/) (2020)
- [MedMNIST Classification Decathlon: A Lightweight AutoML Benchmark for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14925/) (2020)
- [From data to functa: Your data point is a function and you can treat it like one](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12204/) (2022)
- [HyperDiffusion: Generating Implicit Neural Fields with Weight-Space Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17015/) (2023)
- [Modulated Periodic Activations for Generalizable Local Functional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03960/) (2021)
- [NAF: Neural Attenuation Fields for Sparse-View CBCT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14540/) (2022)
- [Equivariant Architectures for Learning in Deep Weight Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12780/) (2023)
- [VideoINR: Learning Video Implicit Neural Representation for Continuous Space-Time Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04647/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Optimizing Rank for High-Fidelity Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14366/) (2025)
- [NOIR: Neural Operator mapping for Implicit Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13118/) (2026)
- [Low-Rank-Modulated Functa: Exploring the Latent Space of Implicit Neural Representations for Interpretable Ultrasound Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25951/) (2026)
- [Neural Field Tokenizations with Hierarchy and Spatial Locality Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08204/) (2026)
- [Modelling Geographic Atrophy Progression using Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10807/) (2026)
- [Observation-Conditioned Latent Energy Priors for Sparse Implicit Neural Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03694/) (2026)
- [Optimization Encoders: Rethinking Second-Order Meta-Learning for Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08075/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research in medical imaging primarily focuses on discrete data representations that poorly scale with grid resolution and fail to capture the often continuous nature of the underlying signal. Neural Fields (NFs) offer a powerful alternative by modeling data as continuous functions. While single-instance NFs have successfully been applied in medical contexts, extending them to large-scale medical datasets remains an open challenge. We therefore introduce MedFuncta, a unified framework for large-scale NF training on diverse medical signals. Building on Functa, our approach encodes data into a unified representation, namely a 1D latent vector, that modulates a shared, meta-learned NF, enabling generalization across a dataset. We revisit common design choices, introducing a non-constant frequency parameter ω in widely used SIREN activations, and establish a connection between this ω-schedule and layer-wise learning rates, relating our findings to recent work in theoretical learning dynamics. We additionally introduce a scalable meta-learning strategy for shared network learning that employs sparse supervision during training, thereby reducing memory consumption and computational overhead while maintaining competitive performance. Finally, we evaluate MedFuncta across a diverse range of medical datasets and show how to solve relevant downstream tasks on our neural data representation. To promote further research in this direction, we release our code, model weights and the first large-scale dataset - MedNF - containing > 500 k latent vectors for multi-instance medical NFs.