# MaskMed: Decoupled Mask and Class Prediction for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15603/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14791/) (2021)
- [AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08023/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [3D UX-Net: A Large Kernel Volumetric ConvNet Modernizing Hierarchical Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15076/) (2022)
- [MaskSAM: Towards Auto-prompt SAM with Mask Classification for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14103/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image segmentation typically adopts a point-wise convolutional segmentation head to predict dense labels, where each output channel is heuristically tied to a specific class. This rigid design limits both feature sharing and semantic generalization. In this work, we propose a unified decoupled segmentation head that separates multi-class prediction into class-agnostic mask prediction and class label prediction using shared object queries. Furthermore, we introduce a Full-Scale Aware Deformable Transformer module that enables low-resolution encoder features to attend across full-resolution encoder features via deformable attention, achieving memory-efficient and spatially aligned full-scale fusion. Our proposed method, named MaskMed, achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing nnUNet by +2.0% Dice on AMOS 2022 and +6.9% Dice on BTCV.