# TomoGraphView: 3D Medical Image Classification with Omnidirectional Slice Representations and Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [Geometric deep learning: going beyond Euclidean data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08097/) (2016)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4389/) (2014)
- [Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation for Graph Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05718/) (2020)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis: Full Training or Fine Tuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00712/) (2017)
- [The KiTS19 Challenge Data: 300 Kidney Tumor Cases with Clinical Context, CT Semantic Segmentations, and Surgical Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00445/) (2019)
- [Models Genesis: Generic Autodidactic Models for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06912/) (2019)
- [Not too little, not too much: a theoretical analysis of graph (over)smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12156/) (2022)
- [Foundational Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18689/) (2023)
- [Phikon-v2, A large and public feature extractor for biomarker prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09173/) (2024)
- [VISTA3D: A Unified Segmentation Foundation Model For 3D Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05285/) (2024)
- [Are Natural Domain Foundation Models Useful for Medical Image Classification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19522/) (2023)
- [The University of California San Francisco Preoperative Diffuse Glioma MRI (UCSF-PDGM) Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00356/) (2021)
- [How Transferable Are Self-supervised Features in Medical Image Classification Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10048/) (2021)
- [Evaluating General Purpose Vision Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis: An Experimental Study of DINOv2 on Radiology Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02366/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models in Radiology: What, How, When, Why and Why Not](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18730/) (2024)
- [DinoBloom: A Foundation Model for Generalizable Cell Embeddings in Hematology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05022/) (2024)

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

- [Multimodal Visual Surrogate Compression for Alzheimer's Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21673/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The sharp rise in medical tomography examinations has created a demand for automated systems that can reliably extract informative features for downstream tasks such as tumor characterization. Although 3D volumes contain richer information than individual slices, effective 3D classification remains difficult: volumetric data encode complex spatial dependencies, and the scarcity of large-scale 3D datasets has constrained progress toward 3D foundation models. As a result, many recent approaches rely on 2D vision foundation models trained on natural images, repurposing them as feature extractors for medical scans with surprisingly strong performance. Despite their practical success, current methods that apply 2D foundation models to 3D scans via slice-based decomposition remain fundamentally limited. Standard slicing along axial, sagittal, and coronal planes often fails to capture the true spatial extent of a structure when its orientation does not align with these canonical views. More critically, most approaches aggregate slice features independently, ignoring the underlying 3D geometry and losing spatial coherence across slices. To overcome these limitations, we propose TomoGraphView, a novel framework that integrates omnidirectional volume slicing with spherical graph-based feature aggregation. Instead of restricting the model to axial, sagittal, or coronal planes, our method samples both canonical and non-canonical cross-sections generated from uniformly distributed points on a sphere enclosing the volume. We publicly share our accessible code base at http://github.com/compai-lab/2025-MedIA-kiechle and provide a user-friendly library for omnidirectional volume slicing at https://pypi.org/project/OmniSlicer.