# GSToken: Geometry-Structured Gaussian Tokens for Compact 3D Medical Image Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17425 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17425/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [Not All Patches are What You Need: Expediting Vision Transformers via Token Reorganizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07800/) (2022)
- [nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10486/) (2018)
- [TransBTS: Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04430/) (2021)
- [Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network based on U-Net (R2U-Net) for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06955/) (2018)
- [3D UX-Net: A Large Kernel Volumetric ConvNet Modernizing Hierarchical Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15076/) (2022)
- [DiNTS: Differentiable Neural Network Topology Search for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15954/) (2021)
- [Fetal Brain Tissue Annotation and Segmentation Challenge Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09573/) (2022)
- [GS-TransUNet: Integrated 2D Gaussian Splatting and Transformer UNet for Accurate Skin Lesion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16748/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective segmentation of multi-modal MRI is central to improving neural network accuracy in brain tumor recognition. Existing methods typically compress 3D volumes into token sequences via fixed patch encoding or learned attention pooling (e.g., TokenLearner). However, these compression schemes discard explicit spatial shape information; the resulting tokens convey no notion of lesion morphology or spatial extent. Meanwhile, end-to-end evaluation entangles a tokenizer's information retention with the reconstruction capacity of the downstream decoder, and the lack of a unified capacity contract across methods makes performance differences difficult to attribute. In this paper, we introduce Gaussian tokens to multi-modal brain tumor segmentation for the first time: each token carries not only a semantic feature but also a learned 3D center, anisotropic scale, and orientation, endowing the representation with explicit geometric support at negligible parameter cost. We further propose a frozen-token utility evaluation protocol: the trained tokenizer is frozen, its output is cast into a fixed-capacity serialized contract, and a shared lightweight Transformer probe independently measures each tokenizer's retained information under strictly matched conditions. Multi-seed paired statistical testing shows that GSToken consistently and substantially outperforms capacity-matched adaptive baselines under frozen probing, with uniform advantages across all tumor sub-regions, surface, and distance metrics. These results demonstrate that explicitly encoding spatial geometry within tokens significantly improves the information density of volumetric representations, offering a new design principle for compact 3D medical image representation and downstream reading.