# Towards Accurate and Fast Clinical Body Composition: A Resource-Efficient Hierarchical Segmentation Framework for Multi-Source CT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07177 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07177/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [VIBESegmentator: Full Body MRI Segmentation for the NAKO and UK Biobank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00125/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Background: Automated 3D segmentation of muscles and adipose tissue from CT is vital for body composition analysis, but multi-source data heterogeneity and high CPU memory demands hinder clinical deployment. Methods: We propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical framework to segment ten tissue structures. Efficiency is optimized using Dynamic Spacing and Anisotropic Patching, a Group Inference mechanism for low-memory sliding-window processing, and Topology-Aware Asymmetric Resampling for fast post-processing. Results: The framework was trained on 1,558 CT volumes from seven public and two private datasets, and evaluated on an independent test cohort (N=105), per-structure Dice coefficients ranged from 0.924 to 0.982. Eight major structures met the +-10% relative error clinical acceptance limit. On a 12-core CPU workstation, the GPU-free pipeline averaged 44.5 seconds per volume with 4.73 GB peak memory. Conclusion: This framework balances accuracy and efficiency, enabling robust, large-scale body composition analysis on standard CPU workstations.