# LightMedSeg: Lightweight 3D Medical Image Segmentation with Learned Spatial Anchors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07228/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (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)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [UNet 3+: A Full-Scale Connected UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08790/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [TransBTS: Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04430/) (2021)
- [nnFormer: Interleaved Transformer for Volumetric Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03201/) (2021)
- [UNETR++: Delving into Efficient and Accurate 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04497/) (2022)
- [Non-local Attention Optimized Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09757/) (2019)
- [P2T: Pyramid Pooling Transformer for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12011/) (2021)
- [Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05369/) (2024)
- [Deeply-Supervised CNN for Prostate Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07523/) (2017)
- [H-DenseUNet: Hybrid Densely Connected UNet for Liver and Tumor Segmentation from CT Volumes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07330/) (2017)
- [Masked LoGoNet: Fast and Accurate 3D Image Analysis for Medical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06190/) (2024)

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

- [LightMedSeg-ISLES: Stroke Lesion Segmentation with 81x Fewer Parameters than nnU-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09634/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate and efficient 3D medical image segmentation is essential for clinical AI, where models must remain reliable under stringent memory, latency, and data availability constraints. Transformer-based methods achieve strong accuracy but suffer from excessive parameters, high FLOPs, and limited generalization. We propose LightMedSeg, a modular UNet-style segmentation architecture that integrates anatomical priors with adaptive context modeling. Anchor-conditioned FiLM modulation enables anatomy-aware feature calibration, while a local structural prior module and texture-aware routing dynamically allocate representational capacity to boundary-rich regions. Computational redundancy is minimized through ghost and depthwise convolutions, and multi-scale features are adaptively fused via a learned skip router with anchor-relative spatial position bias. Despite requiring only 0.48M parameters and 14.64~GFLOPs, LightMedSeg achieves segmentation accuracy within a few Dice points of heavy transformer baselines. Therefore, LightMedSeg is a deployable and data-efficient solution for 3D medical image segmentation. Code will be released publicly upon acceptance.